Latin American fintech's next big thing may involve a regional economic cornerstone: agriculture.
Latin America’s fintech industry is looking for its next big thing, and there’s nowhere better to find it than in the region’s cornerstone business: agriculture. Proposing breakthrough technological solutions for many of the industry’s challenges, agtechs have been on the rise throughout the year, and analysts see 2022 as a pivotal moment for them.
Currently, there are 633 agtechs in the region, according to Crunchbase data. Their focus ranges from precision agriculture, risk analysis and drone monitoring to agricultural banking.
Although the region has not yet produced its first agtech unicorn—a company valued at over $1 billion—global players such as BTG Pactual, Yara Venture Capital, WBGI and even Meta (better known as Facebook) poured large sums of cash into the region’s companies. Statista predicts that agtechs will have a $22.5 billion global market by 2025.
As explained by Alvaro Machado Dias, co-founder of AgMind, “The main challenge is to use data from the agro-industrial chain to produce risk-analysis for the field with the same precision as the stock markets do, therefore scaling outputs and lowering climate-related drawbacks.”
