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KEY POINTS
- Agri-TechE director Dr Belinda Clarke says agtech is working through a tough investment climate.
- She is “increasingly positive” because retailers and supply-chain firms are now engaging innovators directly.
- Tesco’s £20m anchor investment in the £100m Bramble fund shows how that model works in practice.
- Clarke warns that public funding must balance many small bets against a few strategic priorities.
- She argues the next real opportunity is bundling technologies around specific farm problems, not chasing one breakthrough tool.
The money is harder to find than it was three years ago. That much is not in dispute. Agtech founders across Europe, North America, and Africa have spent the past two years adjusting to slower venture rounds. Investors want revenue, not projections. They want proof, not pilots.
Dr Belinda Clarke does not sugarcoat that reality. She is the director of Agri-TechE, a UK organisation that connects farmers, researchers, technology developers, and investors.
“There’s no sugarcoating the fact that it is a tough investment environment,” Clarke told AgNavigator.
Yet her outlook is not gloomy. It is the opposite. Her biggest takeaway from Agri-TechE’s recent Focus on Finance event was the widening range of money available to agtech companies.
That range now includes public grants, non-dilutive debt, angel capital, corporate backing, and venture funding. For Clarke, that mix matters more than any single source.
Did you know?
Tesco put £20m into the £100m Bramble food innovation fund, making it the anchor investor. That fund was set up by Henry Dimbleby, the former UK government food adviser.
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That is a supermarket writing a nine-figure-sized cheque into food innovation. It is not a venture fund. It is a retailer placing a strategic bet on the food system it depends on.
Why supply-chain money changes the game
Clarke’s case rests on one idea. Retailers and food companies are no longer watching from the sidelines.
“Seeing the big supply chain players, not just Tesco, others are doing the same, leaning in, getting engaged with those innovators, I think is providing potentially a different model than the traditional VC model,” she said. The effect, she argues, is commercial rather than purely financial.
“What it’s enabling those companies to do is potentially demonstrate revenues earlier, which is obviously good for everybody, and it’s weaning them off being a grant junkie.”
That last phrase cuts to a real problem. Many agtech start-ups survive on grants for years. Grants do not dilute equity, which is why founders like them. But grants also do not prove that anyone will pay for the product.
A retailer with a supply chain to fix is a different kind of partner. It can become a first customer. It can run a pilot at scale. It can pay on delivery.
For African agtech founders, that distinction matters. Grant dependency is a familiar pattern across the continent’s agricultural technology sector. A paying anchor customer changes the conversation with every later investor.
Public money is carrying more of the early risk
Clarke is also blunt about the value of public funding in the UK. She believes the current environment is unusually strong.
“I think we have probably never had it so good in terms of investment from the public purse into agritech,” she said.
She pointed to the Farming Innovation Programme and to closer cooperation between Defra and Innovate UK.
“It’s quite unprecedented that we have Defra and Innovate UK both coming together to support that early kind of pre-seed de-risking piece.”
That word, de-risking, is doing real work here. Public money absorbs the earliest and riskiest stage of development. Private money then follows with more confidence.
The Focus on Finance event, held at NIAB in Cambridge on 17 September, brought together bodies including the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), Innovate UK, angel investors, and venture funds.
“This is our annual event to showcase the public, private, non-dilutive debt, all the different types of finance that are around for growing ventures in agri-tech and agri-food,” Clarke explained.
What corporate money wants, and what it does not want
Corporate and supply-chain funding is not a softer version of venture capital. It is a narrower version.
Clarke describes retailers and food businesses as more targeted than public programmes. A company might want innovations in post-harvest storage, shelf-life extension, or emissions reduction.
That last category is doing a lot of the work. Large food companies report emissions across three scopes. Scope 3 covers emissions produced by suppliers, not by the company itself. For most food businesses, Scope 3 is the largest part of their footprint.
A technology that cuts farm emissions therefore helps a retailer meet its own climate targets. That gives the retailer a commercial reason to fund it, beyond goodwill.
Clarke is careful not to overstate the influence. She does not think corporates are dictating which innovations get built.
“I don’t think they’re influencing the type of innovation particularly,” she said. “But what I would say is that they probably have a more bespoke set of criteria.”
That narrowness is a feature, not a flaw. It also means corporate money cannot replace public money.
“It’s not going to appeal to everybody,” Clarke said. “And that’s literally not their job. That’s where the public purse comes in.”
The more corporates that enter with different priorities, she suggests, the more agricultural problems get opened up to innovation. If public money is carrying early-stage risk, a question follows. How should governments spread it?
Clarke frames the dilemma clearly. Fund a large number of ideas and accept that many will fail. Or pick a few strategic priorities, such as soil health or water, and concentrate resources there. She rejects both extremes.
“Government has to strike a balance between not being overly prescriptive and exclusive to a number of challenges, but also enabling financing like ARIA does,” she said.
ARIA is designed to back high-risk research. Some of that research looks unusual at first. Clarke argues that is precisely the point. Ideas that seem “wild” or “wacky” at the start can become transformational technologies later.
She acknowledges the tension public funders face.
“The public purse has a difficult line to tread between salami slicing across too many ventures, but also then excluding supporting some of those that are really doing something very innovative, but might not be bang on message in terms of a huge strategic priority.”
It is a familiar problem in African agricultural research too. National research councils and donor programmes often face the same trade-off between breadth and focus.
Clarke also thinks the industry is changing how it talks about technology itself.
The old question was which technology would be next. Would it be artificial intelligence, robotics, or biologicals? Clarke is less interested in that framing now.
“The general shift is around the role of farmers as integrators of these different technologies and seeing the bundling,” she said. Her reasoning is practical. No single product fixes a farm.
“We’re not going to change the industry one start-up or one research project at a time. We need a variety of tech coming together to address particular on-farm and supply chain challenges.”
This idea gets repeated often. Clarke agrees it is easy to say and hard to do. Technology must fit into how a farm already operates. Her phrase for that is “evolution, not revolution”.
“Disruptive technologies are just that, right? They’re disruptive,” she said. “And therefore nobody really wants that in their business because you don’t want to have to down tools while you learn how to use something or completely change your processes.”
She uses agricultural robots as her example. A robot that monitors crops or harvests autonomously is a hard engineering problem. A robot that moves produce around a polytunnel or a packhouse is a much simpler one.
The second task is still valuable. It is physically demanding and low value. Moving it to a machine frees skilled pickers to keep harvesting.
One farmer, Clarke said, describes that kind of machine as “shovel ready”. That is an unglamorous phrase for a genuinely useful category of technology.
What success would look like in twelve months
Asked what a best-case scenario would look like a year from now, Clarke described a specific type of company.
It would have moved past proof of concept. It would hold a blend of public and private investment. It would have accessed programmes supporting manufacturing and scale-up. And it would be embedded inside a supply chain.
“They are then embedded in a supply chain that is demonstrating revenue for them,” she said. “They are then starting to be able to scale, grow, export, all of those things we want to see.”
That description is worth reading twice. It is a definition of success that does not mention valuation, headcount, or press coverage. It mentions revenue and integration.
What this means for African agtech
The UK funding landscape is not Africa’s. Public funding, retailer capital, and venture markets differ sharply across both regions. However, three lessons travel well.
First, customer revenue beats grant income. A supply-chain partner that pays for a pilot is worth more to a founder’s next raise than another non-dilutive grant.
Second, bundling beats isolation. African agritech has strong players in payments, logistics, soil testing, and extension services. The opportunity sits in connecting them around one farmer’s workflow.
Third, unglamorous problems can carry a company. Post-harvest storage, shelf-life, and cold chain are exactly the areas retailers care about most. They are also where African agriculture loses the most value.
Clarke’s model is not a blueprint for the continent. But the underlying logic is portable. Find the buyer with a supply chain problem. Build something simple enough to adopt. Prove revenue before you scale the ambition. Agtech’s venture winter is real. Clarke does not pretend otherwise.
Her optimism rests on something narrower and more grounded. Supply-chain money is arriving. Public funding is holding up early-stage risk in the UK. And founders are being pushed towards revenue far earlier than before.
The sector may end up healthier for it. Companies built on paying customers tend to survive longer than companies built on grant cycles and valuation headlines.
