Maxville/Cornwall/Kingston – March 30, 2022: Canobi AgTech announced today that it has completed a first fundraising round, securing a six-figure convertible debt instrument from leading investors in the Southeastern Ontario & Cornwall areas. These funds will be used to help ramp up sales and distribution worldwide, as well as to continue to innovate new indoor agriculture technologies and grow the company.
This round was spearheaded by Launch Lab AMPLIFY, Kingston, and saw investment from ACCFutures, Cornwall, which holds a contract with Canada’s Regional Development Agencies to deliver the Community Futures Program, as well as members of the Southeastern Ontario Angel Network (SOAN).
“Canobi AgTech is an example of a company looking to scale and our Amplify Program is ideally suited to assist the company as it moves to raise capital and expand markets through this intensive program,” according to Scott Runte, CEO LaunchLab.
ACCFutures chose Canobi because they wanted to support an entrepreneur who is passionate about developing technological innovations in his rural Ontario community. SOAN members saw Canobi’s potential for growth and were impressed by the company’s commitment to building locally-focussed solutions to global issues.
Canobi’s AGRP (Agriculture Resource Planning™) is a seed-to-sale platform that integrates advanced monitoring and automation technology with powerful business planning tools, providing streamlined operations for indoor farmers. Canobi’s innovative technology can help indoor farms reduce their resource usage and grow food more sustainably.
“With the global issues we’re facing today, a paradigm shift towards local food security has become imperative. This leads to other broad benefits: minimizing shipping and handling, picking when ripe, and a shift back to selecting varieties for their nutrition and taste,” says CEO/CINNO Robin Vincent. “We are incredibly excited and proud to be leading innovation in big data technologies that offer farmers real-world value; reducing inputs and maximizing yields.”
Canobi AgTech
Maxville-based Canobi AgTech is the brainchild of ERP veteran and indoor farming visionary Robin Vincent. After six years of consulting in Indoor Farm Management, it was a mandate to build a secure IT network for research into medical cannabis for paediatric oncology that crystallized Robin’s vision. He saw a future where data-driven farming would actualize the dream of indoor agriculture at scale. Food security, mitigating the impacts of climate change, and commercial agriculture sustainability are at the core of Canobi’s vision of empowering local indoor farming to feed the world sustainably. Canobi’s AGRP (Agricultural Resource Planning™) platform integrates monitoring and automation technology with powerful business planning tools to streamline indoor farming operations. Working with indoor farmers, agri-agents, agricultural device and systems manufacturers and farm developers across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, Canobi is on the fast track to becoming the global operating system for indoor agriculture.
Launch Lab
Launch Lab is a Regional Innovation Centre and member of the Ontario Business Support Network, a provincially funded network of resources for entrepreneurs. Our purpose is to foster entrepreneurship and the commercialization of innovations to help build globally competitive companies in Eastern Ontario.
Southeastern Ontario Angel Network (SOAN)
SOAN is a group of passionate, early-stage investors. We invest in local companies with the potential to grow and build a successful business, creating local employment and changing the World, one company at-a-time.
ACCFutures
Founded in 1987 ACCFutures (formerly Cornwall & the Counties Community Futures Development) is an independent, not-for-profit social enterprise, one of 268 organizations in Canada which hold contracts with Canada’s Regional Development Agencies (RDA’s) to deliver the Community Futures Program. ACCFutures not only offers a wide range of funding, financing and capacity building services to the local business communities—with proven impact—it has also undertaken an innovative Indigenous-focused partnerships program which brings Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners together for a stronger economic future. ACCFutures employs local staff and is governed by a volunteer board of directors, made up of local residents representing the community.
