AgriTech Innovation Supported by UCC’s IGNITE

The Irish agricultural sector is a prominent area of the Irish economy, the advancement of this sector is in no small way driven by technological innovation. The impact of Covid-19 and Brexit means farmers now more than ever before are seeking means to reduce cost whilst maintaining a similar or higher level of production.

There has been a steady presence in the number of AgriTech companies in Ireland seeking to make Irish agriculture more efficient, but what does it take to develop a successful start-up that ticks all of the boxes for Irish farmers? I spoke to founder of ‘GyPSy Technologies’ John Cal Kelleher a University College Cork alumni to hear how his first attempt at breaking into the industry with ‘Signifence’, an electric fence monitoring system, taught him the tools he needed to launch a successful AgriTech company in the form of ‘GyPSy Technologies’ a tractor guidance system, designed by an Irish company for Irish farmers. GyPSy Technologies was launched with the help of Cork’s IGNITE programme, an award winning business development programme based in University College Cork, which assists recent graduate entrepreneurs in cultivating the skills to take their concept and develop it into a business.   

John had always fostered a desire to innovate and having spent his youth working on the family farm, combining agriculture and technology was inevitable for him. An incident involving missing calves in his teen years, sparked by an outage in an electric fence, caused John to begin exploring how to create a device which would alert farmers to such outages as they occurred, assisting in stock management, and increasing farm safety.

‘’I knew I’d pay for a solution to that problem. Of course, every farmer in Ireland would pay to solve that problem, I naively reasoned.’’

‘Signifence’ was John’s first start-up venture. The concept involved sensors being placed at strategic positions along an electric fence, recording the voltage being emitted and the current values at that point of the fence, and then reporting them to a cloud infrastructure. Farmers would be able to access this data cloud to identify breakages in the electric fence, saving the farmer time spent searching for the breakage, supporting easy repair and maintenance of the fence.

As a Physics and Maths graduate John needed to develop the necessary business skills to successfully build and manage his start-up company John completed a 12 month programme on business development with Cork’s IGNITE. However, Signifence was never launched, this was primarily due to high development costs not aligning with market size or value of the service in the domestic market. Having come close to burnout trying to launch Signifence John decided to take a different approach towards his entry into agritech and refused to see Signifence as a failure, but rather a learning curve.

‘’[I] was trying to develop a complete solution that could be immediately commercialised all by myself’’.

Realising the key to a successful start-up was not about giving the customer the complete product and satisfying all of their needs instantly, the key was to take the process in stages, constantly offering a product which both improved the customer’s experience and the value of the business. He attributes this as being a key lesson he learnt from Eamon Curtain, the director of IGNITE, and it led him into his next venture.

‘’without the lessons I learnt trying to launch Signifence, and the knowledge I gained from my time in the IGNITE programme there wouldn’t ever have been GyPSy technologies.’’

Equipped with a better knowledge on business and his industry, John began developing GyPSy Technologies tractor guidance systems. Learning from past mistakes John was cautious on pricing, presuming his customers were seeking lower prices to the alternative devices on the market, however as the product was being received by its customers John realised the UPS of the product was not its low price but rather the fact customers appreciated the fact it was an Irish company selling to Irish farmers.

Implementing the IGNITE business process John began GyPSy by selling minimum viable products and building the company up gradually and is in the process of implementing a marketing and sales strategy.

‘’for someone with no business background and limited technical abilities, Signifence was a failure. IGNITE, and Signifence’s lessons from failure, on the other hand were an undoubted success.’’

There was a true sense of encouragement from John toward students contemplating entering the Agri-Tech business sector and embarking upon a start-up of their own.

Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Leo Varadkar TD released figures on Tuesday declaring Enterprise Ireland invested €48 million into Irish businesses last year, with 127 new start-up companies promoted by the initiative in 2019 and a further 125 companies assisted in 2020, Agri-tech was a key sector for investment in both 2019 and 2020. Available funding from government initiatives, as well as business development programmes such as IGNITE in Cork, offer potential entrepreneurs a place to acquire the skills and finances needed to break into their desired sector, there is much potential for individuals across all demographics to make their own impact on the economy, and John’s advice – ‘’Take a jump. Be brave. Change the world.’’

Ciara Coman.