On May 12th, the Itility Group and the Agricultural Intelligence Centre (AIC), a network/platform for agri and climate technology, acquired a majority stake in eLEAF. Both new investors will enable eLEAF to accelerate faster – to anticipate the rapidly growing industry demand for large-scale satellite-based data solutions. This improves business outcomes and supports the sustainable development goals for water and food security (SDG6 and SDG2).
Wageningen-based company eLEAF has approximately 40 employees and is a leading party in Earth Observation Services. eLEAF is a pioneer with 20 years of experience in facilitating climate resilience in the agriculture, water management, and crop insurance sectors. It specializes in satellite-based data solutions for sustainable crop production, water and irrigation management, and management of drought and climate risk for growers and agri-businesses in the value chain. Its core technology delivers high-quality evapotranspiration and biomass production data, from continental to field scale. eLEAF operates globally, from monitoring water productivity in Africa and the Middle East for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to crop monitoring for fruit growers in South Africa and sugar cane producers in Colombia. This enables next-level digitization of business processes for eLEAF’s customers in the agricultural, water, and insurance domains – on top of promoting the sustainability of value chains and making them more resilient to climate change.
Supported by the Itility Group, eLEAF can further scale its technology and deploy this across the globe to support farmers, companies, and institutions. By attracting Dutch investors, the technology is further developed in the Netherlands and thus indirectly contributes to strengthening the Dutch agri-sector.
With the help of AIC, eLEAF’s technology can be deployed on a wider geographical scale through its channels in Africa and globally.
This is the second acquisition in this sector in the Netherlands in the past six months and is an example of the rapidly increasing demand for services and applications based on satellite data.