Denmark’s Agreena bags €46M to incentivise farmers on sustainable carbon farming journey

Copenhagen-based Agreena, a startup that verifies and sells carbon credits generated by farmers, announced on Thursday that it has raised €46M in a Series B round of funding.

The round was led by Germany’s leading multi-stage investor HV Capital and saw participation from new investors AENU and Anthemis. 

The round was also supported by existing shareholders, including evergreen food investor Gullspång Re:food, tech investor Kinnevik, and Denmark’s Export and Investment fund.

Growth after Series A round

The latest funding comes after Agreena raised €20M in its Series A round in February 2022. Since then, the company’s operations have multiplied by ten.

Its geographic reach has increased to include cropland in 16 different European nations and it has also collaborated with farms to assist in the conversion of more than 600,000 hectares to climate-positive, regenerative farming.

Simon Haldrup, co-founder of Agreena, says, “In order for the world’s farmers to transition to regenerative agriculture and create a scalable climate impact, the financial rails to support and pay them for it, need to be built.”

“Agreena is building out technological and financial services infrastructure throughout the agriculture value chain as the industry increasingly becomes a focal point for decarbonisation efforts,” adds Haldrup.

“From farmer to fintech”

Agreena says corporates, governments, and supply networks are focusing on the agricultural lands for carbon removals in order to achieve global net-zero goals as regenerative farming momentum spreads across the world.

Farmers will play an ever-more-important part in addressing climate change, food poverty, and other important environmental problems by implementing regenerative agriculture practices.

Agreena has found a method to use the carbon market to leverage this effect into a new and additional income source for farmers to help pay for the transition.

Farmers can use the company’s platform to plan, monitor, and verify changes for their regenerative journey, switching from releasing CO2 to drawing CO2 down and depositing it within their grounds. 

The operational performance of fields is enhanced by the increased soil health and biodiversity, which decrease the need for inputs while increasing farmers’ resilience to unfavourable climatic circumstances (such as drought or flooding).

Agreena’s certificates and downstream services also assist businesses that are concerned about the environment and are already working to reduce their carbon footprint.

Additionally, companies in the food supply chain are becoming more and more dependent on field-level traceability of their agricultural commodities to meet Scope 3 reporting requirements.

The Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard is intended to allow for comparisons of a company’s GHG pollution over time.

The road to net zero

Agreena’s recent acquisition of remote sensing firm Hummingbird Technologies has allowed it to broaden its offering beyond farms to include agridata services for supply chain players, governments, and other organisations.

Agreena’s platform now includes a ‘world-leading’ AI-based monitoring and verification solution that uses satellite imagery, ground-truth data, and machine learning to identify and report on-farm regenerative agriculture practices.

The company aims to take the lead in assisting the road to net zero for the entire value chain and offers worldwide monitoring.

Alexander Joel-Carbonell, partner at HV Capital, says, “Real climate impact is only created at scale and Agreena is perfectly positioned to distribute their carbon farming capabilities across the globe to bring high-quality, verifiable and nature-based carbon credits to the market. Only with carbon removals, can net zero targets be met.”

“We are on a journey to remove the economic barriers to the adoption of regenerative agriculture for farmers and their entire ecosystem – carbon is just the beginning,” adds Haldrup.

Agreena’s Carbon Certification

The programme offered by Agreena is certified to the ISO 14064-2 standard and uses an IPCC-aligned approach that has been independently validated. 

The company says it is standard-inclusive and will keep improving its product as laws and research advance. Additionally, Agreena is presently getting certification with Verra; the procedure is anticipated to be finished this year.