GARNER — Growers Holdings – the Raleigh-based agtech company founded by NC State grad Steven Valencsin when he was just 23 — has been acquired by an Israeli chemical giant.
ICL, a global specialty minerals and chemical company based out of Tel Aviv, announced the deal today saying the acquisition “expands and strengthens our offering of agro-digital services and our capability to develop innovative solutions to generate higher agricultural yields and more efficient and sustainable agricultural practices.”
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 2011, Growers has developed a unique system that analyzes farmland data. It’s called CLICK (because it’s supposed to make “all the moving pieces in agriculture” do just that), and among its many attributes: the ability to create precise fertilizer and seed recommendations within seconds, not weeks.
It can also model accurate costs and revenues per acre that help with financial planning. But perhaps most intriguing, it requires zero data entry from the farmer.
Growers Holdings CEO and founder Steven Valencsin.
“By combining Growers’ one-of-a-kind platform with ICL’s extensive agronomic know-how, we are accelerating our market reach and development roadmap to create an unparalleled digital service offering focused on providing agro-professionals with unique access to currently untapped and unstructured data in a simple, fast and actionable way,” said Raviv Zoller, ICL’s CEO and president in a release.
“Agriculture is an industry that impacts every person on the planet,” added Valencsin. “Our belief is that there is significant opportunity to drive a more sustainable, profitable future through the better utilization of agriculture data. We are very excited to be united in this mission with ICL and share a common approach to delivering value to our customers. For our customers, its business as usual, although we expect that ICL’s unique know-how and access to the Israeli technological ecosystem and its broad capabilities will allow us to deliver increasing value over time.”
Valencsin will remain CEO, and the company will continue to service their customers while leveraging ICL’s resources to continue building technological solutions that deliver value to farmers and their trusted advisors around the world.
In addition, ICL announced that Yoram Sadan has been appointed as the Head of ICL’s Digital Services Business, effective this March. He will report to Raviv Zoller, ICL President & CEO, and will be a member of ICL’s senior management team.
