Swiss-Indian food and tech platform company Pioneering Ventures rebrands to Innoterra

Pioneering Ventures, a Swiss-Indian food and technology platform company that helped plug gaps in farming supply chains in India, has rebranded to become a cloud-based platform called Innoterra.

The new company will build a data-driven platform that will equip farmers and other stakeholders with access to data on their mobile phones in a bid to boost productivity and efficiency, it said in a statement on Thursday.

Innoterra will also draw from Pioneering Ventures' work with farmers and other food and technology ventures in India.

Pioneering Ventures has been incubating and developing ventures across India’s agriculture and food supply chain for more than 16 years. It helped improve farm productivity through modern practices and invested 10 billion Indian rupees ($1.37bn) into four ventures that solve problems in agriculture supply chains.

“We see our company as an integral part of the food ecosystem and view our role as an orchestrator with the mission to provide consumers access to healthier and more sustainably produced food, while empowering farmers and other stakeholders in the system," Ron Pal, founder of Pioneering Ventures and chief executive of Innoterra, said.

Innoterra, which has a footprint in 14 countries including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and Iraq, provides products and services to 65,000 farmers and serves around 1.5 million consumers daily through a range of branded high-quality food products with a daily production of 450 tonnes.

The company has more than 120 collection and distribution centres across India, the Middle East and the Philippines.

Food security has come into focus following the Covid-19 pandemic, which disrupted supply chains and trade. In November, the UN World Food Programme estimated that an additional 137 million people could face acute food insecurity by the end of 2020, an 82 per cent increase compared to the pre-Covid estimate of acutely food insecure people in the world.

“In the next 30 years, we will have to increase food productivity by 70 per cent to feed the 10 billion people then living on our planet,” Mr Pal said. “As food security and sustainability is becoming an important global challenge, we must critically question the status quo of the industry and the entire food ecosystem.”

Innoterra, through its data-driven platform, aims to improve the production and distribution of healthy food in a sustainable manner. Currently, it collaborates with more than 15,000 farmers' families to procure fully traceable food products.

The company recently rolled out a solution to empower farmers and rural entrepreneurs by providing farm management training, education and networking. The product also offers improved access to farm inputs, infrastructure and financial services, including affordable loans, the company said.

Innotera said it will continue to scale up its food operations in India and further expand its sourcing and distribution footprint in regions such as the Middle East, Eastern Europe and China, Akshaya Kamath, chairman of Innoterra India, said.