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Why Eniac is helping break down fences with Vence
Feb 26, 2018 · 2 min read
By Vic Singh, Founding General Partner
We are excited to announce that Eniac co-led the seed round in Vence, a startup out of San Diego that is changing the way livestock and pastureland are managed. The round was co-led by Kickstart Seed Fund with participation from Rabo Food & Agri Innovation Fund.
Globally, livestock and pastureland are multi-trillion dollar assets that are currently managed with a bifurcated approach of manual labor and legacy technology, with a limited view into true real-time data.
Vence's platform is changing the entire approach by building a virtual fencing livestock management platform powered by industrial IoT, data and machine learning. They are removing the barriers — physically and metaphorically — that have limited livestock and pastureland management from fully entering the digital era. Vence is reinventing the outdated, static practices and reducing perpetual labor costs by ~25% allowing livestock owners to fully optimize land usage with AI, and track and manage animal welfare in real time, all from a mobile device.
Vence is also doing right by the animals and the planet. The ability to roam and graze freely with less human/machine interaction, coupled with real time monitoring of vitals provides the animals a higher quality of life. Also, when cattle are managed more efficiently on the land, it significantly helps carbon sequestration as the grass doesn't die out and regrows more naturally. Vence's technology was built based on research done by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and MIT.
We are excited to partner with Frank Wooten, whose business acumen and domain expertise impressed us from the outset. Previously, Franks was the Founder & Managing Partner of Point Blank Capital, and was introduced to the idea and the benefits of virtual fencing and rotational grazing by a friend, Jasper Holdsworth, who owned a hundred-year-old cattle farm. And while the idea has been researched for more than 30 years, building a business has never been economically viable until now — We are at a cross section of available technology with lowering component costs and the high demand for grass-fed beef.
Read more about Vence in TechCrunch: Pitching a wearable to make cattle farming more sustainable, Vence raises $2.7 million
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