In today’s agriculture, the demand for sustainable practices is more pressing than ever, and greenwashing has become more prevalent than ever. Farmers and agribusinesses are seeking effective ways to implement and verify eco-friendly methods. Enter CDL Alumni ucrop.it, an innovative platform that is transforming agricultural management by making monitoring, reporting and verification more accessible, transparent, and accurate.
Founded in 2018 by Diego Hoter (CEO), Marcos Botta (Chief Innovation Officer), and Matías O’Keefe (Chief Technology Officer), ucrop.it emerged from a vision to digitize, verify, and reward sustainable agricultural practices. The founders, leveraging their extensive experience in agribusiness and technology, recognized the need for a solution that could provide verifiable and traceable data on farming practices, aligning with global sustainability standards.
Ucrop.it offers a digital platform that enables farmers and companies to establish and achieve nature-positive, sustainable agriculture goals in a transparent, and accurate manner. By facilitating the recording and traceability of sustainable crops within a blockchain secure environment, the platform ensures that agricultural practices are verifiable and aligned with relevant sustainability standards.
In 2023, ucrop.it partnered with NASA Harvest, NASA’s Global Food Safety and Agriculture Consortium, to enhance crop monitoring and environmental indicator management. This collaboration involved mapping 25,000 acres of maize and wheat across Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, providing valuable data to improve models and tools addressing agricultural challenges and climate change impacts.
Since graduating from CDL in 2021, ucrop.it has expanded into multiple countries, including Australia, Canada, USA, Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru. The platform has onboarded over 1,000 active farmers and analyzed 21 million acres of land, reflecting its growing influence in promoting sustainable agriculture globally. After graduating from CDL-Toronto, the company began to scale considerably, raising $10 million in a pre-series A funding round.
“From my experience at CDL, it was like adding gasoline to our growth trajectory. Firstly, we were connected to CDL Mentor Scott Stornetta which resulted in our second successful financial round in 2021 and then through the programme itself, it empowered the team and company to actually “build something massive,” says Diego Hoter. “There is no comparable program like CDL globally that spans across so many venture verticals with such opportunities.”
ucrop.it continues to innovate, focusing on providing verifiable, ground-proof data that supports sustainability claims through farm to market Crop Stories. By expanding its geographic presence and deepening partnerships, the company aims to drive revenue growth while controlling costs, ensuring that sustainable agriculture is not only achievable but also profitable for all stakeholders involved.
As of today, traders like COFCO use their algorithms to verify the sustainable origin of agricultural products, ensuring compliance with global standards like EUDR, USDA-EPA, ISCC, and 2BS on land use. CPGs such as Nestlé and Mondelez trace cereals with verified nature-positive metrics from farm to market using ucrop.it’s Crop Story algorithm. Biofuels companies like NESTE also tracks camelina crops to produce low-carbon renewable biofuels, ensuring traceability from farm to tank. “ucrop.it provides a scalable, cost-effective way to simplify compliance in an era of increasing sustainability regulations,” says Diego Hoter, Co-Founder & CEO.
In a world increasingly focused on environmental stewardship, ucrop.it stands at the forefront, offering solutions that benefit the entire agricultural value chain. Through its innovative platform, the company is making significant strides toward a more sustainable and transparent agricultural future.
