Alongside this year’s Silicon Gorge: Autumn Edition we’re publishing profiles of a few of the companies that have made it through to the heats. This week it’s Bristol-based SaaS food traceability company, Agrantec.
Here to answer our questions is Agrantec Founder & Director Martn Coates.
What does your company do?
Agrantec is a SaaS food traceability company. We are driven by a passion for food and technology. We want SME food businesses to have the power that technology delivers to big companies and is as easy to use as Instagram. We use cloud technology to ensure the data stored is easy to access and share securely. From production management to forecasting, NotaZone is equipped to manage and adapt to the unique business requirements of small to large food businesses alike.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Today, the food consumer has changed. Not only are they demanding better quality and more options, they want to know the story behind their food as well as better information on topics like allergens. And the demands for compliance/certification get ever larger and time consuming. Even consumers are bewildered by what some food labels, e.g. Red Tractor, Soil Association, Leaf, etc mean, never mind the business that has to manage all the data to comply. We solve that compliance issue of time constraints, organisation, sharing that type of data with third parties; and deliver the business functions that the owners and managers need to run for an effective business. We sit between retail sales systems (for those that sell direct) like shopify and accounting functions. For B2B companies, we start at order entry.
What makes your solution unique?
Unlike most traceability systems, we have built the business management functions for each type of target business on top of a trace and share platform rather than bolted traceability in. It means compliance comes intuitively to users largely free from recording day to day work.
What are you most proud of so far?
We have over 40 very diverse food businesses as paying customers using the system day-in day-out. Our best implementations are done in hours, but we are flexible so we also help customers that need to go more slowly.
“Richard is the best support guy I’ve worked with. If I have any problems, I just call Richard. I love him and even my wife loves him!” – Chris Crutchley, Founder & MD, Eat Raw Chocolate
How much are you raising and what do you want to use the investment for?
£2m to fund sales and marketing, invest in further integrations and ensure our support team has the capacity to look after our customers. This growth will also mean we need a bit more help in HR and finance functions too. At the end of this period we also want to be ready to take our first international step.
What tools/people/services/organisations helped you most?
Our customers, especially those in the early days who had the patience to bear with us as we designed the solution
Where can we find out more about you?
