Seedsight’s platform is focused on increasing the amount of food available in the future with the same current resources by addressing challenges critical to the survival of food systems: the quality, availability and availability of staple foods such as grains and seeds.
Seedsight is a deep-tech startup incubated at UPTEC– Science and Technology Park of U. Porto, in Portugal. It aims to provide the agri-food chain with the necessary knowledge to improve the decision-making process in acquiring raw materials for food products, contributing to the global fight against food waste and fraud and sustainability throughout the value chain.
In recent decades, the cost of food commodities such as wheat, maize, rice, oats and quinoa has increased by 18-20%. This increase is largely due to challenges in the early stages of the value chain, such as the inefficiency of time-consuming and expensive grain selection processes. Seedsight's solution aims to improve production and reduce waste and economic losses.
Seedsight’s technology can simultaneously validate cereal characterisation information via low-cost, large-scale online biomolecular and biophysical analyses (making it possible to monitor entire shipments of cereals) using blockchain, deep learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and optical sensor technologies, which leads to the optimisation of the identification of the best species, origins and suppliers of seeds and grains at the most competitive prices.
The Portuguese startup's models predict a future reduction of 8% in the cost of sorting the best grains, a reduction of up to 89% in the time needed to obtain the best grains, and a 20% increase in productivity in the transformation of grains into final products (thus increasing the amount of food available with the same current resources)
Seedsight chosen as one of the top 100 European startups
Seedsight was recently selected as one of the 100 European startups highlighted by Techstars Deep Tech Berlin, which is in the acceleration process. For the Executive Director of the German accelerator, Martin Schilling, the Seedsight solution is vital for global food security. “Seedsight aims to increase the quality of seeds and grains, achieving an improvement of up to 10 times. In addition to being an important step for commodity trading, this process is vital for global food security, translating into a decisive value proposition for customers and investors.”
This year, it reached the Top 17 among the finalists of the ParticleX Urbantech Global Challenge 2024, an initiative focused on the Asian market. Seedsight is conducting pilot studies in collaboration with partners in Africa to detect mycotoxins as part of the Validate.Global programme, promoted by Impact Hubs Vienna, Kigali and Accra. It is also integrated into the European project EPICENTRE and was a finalist in the last cohort of the Global Entrepeurnership Center in Dusseldorf, Germany. Furthermore, the prestigious “Women in Agriculture 2023 Award” was awarded at the renowned European agri-food technology fair, AGRITECHNICA, based in Germany.
