'To make a substantial impact, the key is to identify the economic levers that are aligned with impact'

Interview with Sebastien Boyer, co-founder & Chairman @ FarmWise

This month’s interview is very down to earth or even more… “down to soil”. We had the chance to interview Sebastien Boyer, the successful founder and chairman of FarmWise, to understand how he managed to create a major industrial project in agriculture while delivering positive impact.

Aligning profit-seeking endeavours with a more holistic vision of our activities’ impact on ecosystems is crucial and all the more obvious in a sector like agriculture where economic performance is directly linked to environmental conditions.

As the agricultural sector increasingly relies on data analysis and technological tools, Sebastien Boyer advocates for an agriculture where these technological developments serve the sector's environmental and social transition.

Can you tell us about your background and how FarmWise came to be?

After graduating from Polytechnique, I moved to the United States for a Master's program focused on AI, and in particular on computer understanding of images and videos. By the end of my program, Thomas Palomares (a fellow Polytechnique alumnus) and I saw an opportunity in integrating cutting-edge technology into farming. With him having an agricultural background and both of our technical knowledge, our goal was to explore how new technologies like computer vision and data analytics could address critical challenges in agriculture. That’s how FarmWise was born.

What is FarmWise's core vision?

FarmWise aims at reducing reliance on chemical inputs by setting up innovative agricultural machinery using cameras and AI to observe and respond in real-time to agricultural processes. Our starting point was the observation that the main hurdle to making the sector more efficient was not a lack of data or softwares — quite the opposite. Rather, the key to improving environmental and economic performance was for farmers to know what to do with this information. With FarmWise, we design a new type of agricultural machinery that observes and processes real-time data, thanks to the videos collected. We're already putting this principle into practice in weed control, with our first product. How it works: it is a device attached to tractors, which identifies the plants, their species and their position in 3D, and cuts these weeds with small blades. It’s chemical-free and far more efficient than manual work. Our medium-term objectives are to extend this concept to other types of machines and  to work with existing manufacturers.

How did you go about funding such an ambitious project?

Right from the start, we had a major need for funding. And securing funding is a significant challenge, especially for a deeptech startup in agriculture. Starting with venture capital investments in the United States — where there’s no public funding, we gradually scaled our funding rounds, and tried to attract a diverse range of investors. I’d say it was a twofold challenge: showing consistent progress without significant early revenue or a fully developed product and knowing how and when to talk to the right investors. Initially, we had ‘technical investors’ to whom we had to demonstrate the quality of the product’s execution, without being able to rely on metrics, at that stage. Then there were investors specialised in the agricultural sector, who had a better understanding of market distribution risks that appear fairly quickly for an AgTech company. More recently, there have been strategic investors who, over and above the financial return, had a strategic interest in partnering with us. All along, our approach was to demonstrate the potential and scalability of our solution, emphasising the quality of execution and potential impact on agriculture, rather than relying on revenue metrics.

Do you think you could have managed to fund Farmwise in Europe ?

I sometimes get this question, which is not easy to answer because I think the company would have been very different. I get from my talks with other entrepreneurs and my own experience that it is extremely difficult to fund deeptechs in Europe. And I don’t see things moving too much, to be honest. Unless your activity is very much aligned with government priorities, which is the case with AI at the moment, the European ecosystem is just not made to fund deeptechs. Europe has other things to offer, though. I mentioned public versus private funding, earlier: I think Europe is more conducive for public funding. But I am not convinced it is efficient for an economy. Especially for impact companies, which have to scale up and get really big to have significant influence.

How central was the environmental impact to your mission?

The environmental impact was our initial motivation. We wanted to address the extensive use of agricultural chemicals and their effects on health, biodiversity and the environment. But to make a tangible impact, we recognised early that this environmental issue had to be translated into an economic problem to attract customers — in this case farmers. I suppose this is the case for many impact issues but, in agriculture, the environmental issue is obviously important, because it directly affects farmers' activities. Even though the primary incentives remain those linked to profit, especially as farmers do not generate a great deal of profit and therefore cannot afford to take initiatives that are not aligned with economic performance. Apart from the environmental issue, another major challenge for the sector is the lack of workforce. We realised that these two problems were linked and that we needed to have a global vision to help farmers modernise and be more efficient with a solution that met their short-term economic constraints (making more profit, or losing less money) and at the same time build an infrastructure that would make their business more viable in the long term. So there was always this dual focus — developing solutions with environmental sustainability and economic viability. It's a personal conviction of mine, and I think it ought to be applied to all impact companies: the key is to identify the economic levers that are aligned with impact, and play on those economics.

Have you noticed a change in mindset among farmers and investors regarding environmental impact?

There's a discernible shift in mindset among investors. I would say there has been a growing interest in investing in climate-related subjects. This trend was reinforced during the 2020-2021 period, reflecting a broader societal shift towards sustainability, but has somewhat faded since. In the United States, we are even starting to see strong criticism of ESG. As for farmers, they are aware of the long-term benefits of environment-friendly practices and trying to strike a balance with their own economic constraints. Above all, farmers have another important driver: meeting consumer demand. If this demand changes, towards organic farming for instance, farmers' practices will also have to evolve. Once again, it’s difficult for them to get further purely economic incentives: they have to maximise long-term profit, which means taking care of their land, because if it’s no longer productive in 10 years’ time, that’s not good for their business. So there are incentives close to environmental impact, without it being the main issue.

What are the major changes you observe in the agricultural world?

Similar to what other industries are experiencing, the agricultural sector is undergoing a shift towards enhanced efficiency driven by a desire to make better decisions thanks to technologies and more accurate data. So there really is this notion of efficiency, of productivity. It can be measured in various ways: harvest per hectare, quantity of chemical input, number of people involved, or dollar obtained. It requires technologies and machines with better fuel consumption management and better use of chemical inputs, for example. It also requires more data and a more efficient use of it. Genetic issues and a better understanding of the microbiome constitute another trend. There has been a fair amount of innovation with new techniques for modifying and reading the genome, and cheaper techniques for measuring bacteria… In a nutshell: there are indeed some interesting technological developments, but agriculture is an industry that inherently evolves more slowly than others.

What about the social aspect of agriculture, particularly regarding farmers themselves?

I'm more familiar with the American farming world because I've been living there for several years, but I think the mindsets in Europe and in the United States are quite different. For the record, there's a popular TV show in the US called Clarkson's Farm, which talks about farmers’ lives from a very positive angle. In the US, the modernisation of agriculture is completely in line with the objective of restoring farmers’ image: they are depicted as businessmen who use new technologies and AI, like everyone else does. With FarmWise, we try to participate in this by helping to create better paid and qualified jobs — technicians specialised in modern agricultural machinery. In Europe, I feel that the narrative is quite different: technology is sometimes pitted against sustainable, healthy and socially responsible agriculture. But this dichotomy is irrelevant. Everyone has an opinion on agriculture, because everyone eats. Just like in football, where everyone seems to know best who should be in the team. Coming back to agriculture, naturally, some practices that purely increase profits can be detrimental to the environment, and conversely, some are good for the environment but not economically viable. There also are solutions at the intersection of these two extremes! My fantasy image of agriculture in 50 years' time is of ultra-modern, automated farming, where everything is constantly monitored, and farming completely carbon-free. This would make it possible to be efficient, in both 'dollar return' and 'environmental return’, thanks to very few chemical inputs. We should always seek both economic and environmental efficiency — and efficiency requires technology and innovation.