Croatian Farmeron, one of the pioneers of the Balkan startup scene, has just been acquired by Virtus Nutrition based in the USA. Virtus Nutrition is one of the leading tech-oriented companies in the industry of fatty acid nutrition for dairy cattle. Farmeron, on the other hand, is a cloud-based farm management platform offering detailed analytics on the performance of individual animals and the farm as a whole. The recent merge of the two companies is expected to accelerate their collaboration in delivering a one-of-a-kind livestock farming software.
Croatian Farmeron Acquisition
Farmeron was founded in late 2010 in Osijek, Croatia by Matija Kopic and Marko Dukmenic. Declaring itself as the “Google Analytics for farms,” Farmeron has seen great success ever since, proving their good choice of a niche market that has enormous potential and low competition. Farmeron first started marketing in Eastern Europe. However, Croatian Farmeron management software is currently being used by some of the largest dairy farms in the US. Today the company is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio.
In addition, Farmeron has had a total equity funding of $4.27 million in 5 investment rounds coming from 20 investors, according to data available on Crunchbase. Seedcamp, NextView Ventures, 500 Startups, as well as Matt Swanson are among the names listed on their long investment list.
Matt Swanson is not only one of the most recent investors in Farmeron in 2014, but also the owner of a large group of agri-business companies, including Virtus Nutrition. He’s been advising Farmeron CEO Matija Kopic for several years and believes this acquisition will accelerate the development of the farm industry:
“Technology and data have always been at the very heart of what we do. We’ve been witnessing how cloud technologies and data science have gradually permeated and significantly improved most industries, and that trend is now about to radically change the livestock industry as well. Since I’ve had a chance to observe Farmeron in action on our family farm for years now, I believe we have the game-changing technology which is going to help the livestock industry transition into a new era,” says Matt Swanson in his official declaration.
Matija Kopic, who will remain to be the head of Farmeron, also confirms the exhilaration for working on the world’s largest farm database. “We’re thrilled to join Virtus and start benefiting from their vast experience and knowledge of the market. Our companies share a common vision of putting technology and data at the very heart of a new farm management paradigm. Our ultimate agenda is to know everything about every single farm animal out there. It’s a long path ahead of us, but we’re excited to work with Matt and his team on aggregating the largest farm animal database on the planet.”
