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The Venture Codex

National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations

JA Bldg., 1-3-1 Otemachi, Tokyo, Chiyoda-ku, 100-6832, Japan

Overview

National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations (全国農業協同組合連合会), aka ZEN-NOH Group, is a federation of agricultural cooperatives in Japan. ZEN-NOH has interests in rice, fruits & vegetables, farm products, livestock sales & production, dairy farming, fertilizer, agrichemicals, agricultural machinery, petroleum products, and more.

Total investments
1
Lead investments
0
Investments · 12mo
0
Active investors
0

Sector focus

  • Agriculture
  • Food and Beverage
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Investment portfolio

  • Farmnote holdings Japan

    Participated · Equity · May 2017

    Farmnote Holdings is a dairy- and livestock-focused DX company headquartered in Obihiro, Hokkaido, delivering cloud-based farm-management and genetics products through its subsidiary Farmnote. Its flagship service, Farmnote Gene, collects genomic data from dairy cows and provides analysis via the cloud, capturing roughly 30% of Japan’s domestic gene-testing market. A wholly owned subsidiary operates two demonstration farms and the group manages about 1,500 cows, combining DX tools with advanced husbandry to drive productivity. The company uses its products to support productivity and management improvement for dairy and beef producers and plans to strengthen its genetics and breeding business, expand its DX product suite, and enhance customer-success and cross-sell efforts. Following the recent financing, the company’s cumulative capital raised is approximately ¥5.3 billion. Farmnote manufactures the Farmnote Color wearable that attaches to an animal’s head to collect real-time activity data and feed an analytics platform that alerts farmers when cattle are unwell, ovulating, or giving birth. Farmers can integrate their own herd data to improve analytics for each cow. Sales of Farmnote Color grew nearly 30-fold in three years to 1,600 farms covering 160,000 heads of cattle. The company intends to use the new funding for further R&D and to expand overseas, leveraging a partnership with Sumitomo Corporation for international distribution. Domestically it will work with the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations and NTT DOCOMO to distribute the technology. Farmnote was founded by Kobayashi-san, who returned from an IT career to farming in Hokkaido and built the product to address farmer pain points.

Team

No current team members are available.