Agriculture service provider Farmfriend receives USD 7.4 million for Series A
Farmfriend
Founder: Yu Yang
Founded in: 2016
Financing status: RMB 50 million (USD 7.4 million) Series A round in 2017
Agriculture service provider Farmfriend on Tuesday receives USD 7.4 million for its Series A financing round to enhance its agricultural services for protect farms from pests.
Farmfriend is an agricultural production service provider that helps farmer deal with pests through spraying pesticides with drones on farms, which is called flight prevention services in this industry.
Flight prevention is an industry term in Chinese, which means using drones to spray pesticides on farms to prevent pest damage. There are also some workers who are professionals of this process, who are also known as flight prevention workers.
It is an online-to-offline (O2O) platform between farmers and flight prevention workers. Firstly, it helps farmer to find flight prevention services on its platform by attracting professional flight prevention workers or even training these types of workers. It also helps flight prevention workers to find customers, make appointments, and completing payment and collecting bills.
Founded in 2016 in Beijing, Farmfriend has now thousands of flight prevention workers with more than 5,000 drones that are available on its platform. Its agriculture services has so far reached 1 million acres in 2017 which is a tenfold growth from 2016.
This Series A financing round was led by Gobi Partners, with Yunqi Partners and a group of previous investors investing in this round. The capital will be used to expand its agriculture services scope, and develop more partners in the pesticide sales industry to form a more complete service chain.
Car safety services provider E-car receives USD 5.9 million for Series A
E-car
Founder: Yin Jianhong
Financing status: RMB 40 million (USD 5.9 million) Series A round in 2017
Car safety services provider E-car on Tuesday receives USD 5.9 million for its Series A financing round to integrate artificial intelligence technology with its car safety services.
E-car is a car safety services provider that provides drivers with rescue services when they encounter traffic accidents. It deploys multiple sensors which combines intelligent software identification technologies for accident detection in customers’ cars. The sensor and the software will quickly notify E-car’s rescue center once accidents happen, and E-car’s employees will maintain real-time video communication with the customer at the accident site in order to implement accurate and timely rescue operations.
E-car also expands its rescue operations network by reaching partnerships with hospitals. Currently, its services cover 2,800 districts in China. It has more than 4 million users with 2 million active daily users. The company recruited 200 employees for its call center, which accepts an average 34,000 calls per day.
This Series A financing round was from an undisclosed group of investors, and the company plans to use the fund to introduce artificial intelligence and big data technology to its original services to improve the accuracy and safety of its services.
(Top photo from 58pic.com)