Empowering Farmers: Bovonic's Innovative Solution Set to Save Dairy Industry Millions
Kia Ora friends!
Startup of the month: Bovonic
NZVC is excited to announce our investment in Bovonic, a Tauranga-based company tackling the widespread challenge of Bovine Mastitis, the costliest disease in the global dairy industry. Traditional screening methods are labor-intensive and inaccurate, leading to a cost to the average dairy shed of $60,000 annually in lost production and animal health issues. Bovonic's Quadsense™ is the world's first affordable, effortless, and accurate mastitis detector. This innovative system uses in-cup sensors and machine learning to identify mastitis in its earliest stages, saving farmers an estimated $25,000 annually per dairy shed.
Bovonic is led by Liam Kampshof, a dairy farm-raised engineer with experience in medical device development. The team boasts seasoned professionals in sales and engineering, along with a strong advisory board. After nearly three years of development with a leading mastitis researcher, Bovonic has proven the accuracy of Quadsense™.
They've secured pre-orders from key players and letters of intent from major industry suppliers, demonstrating strong market demand. 250+ NZ farmers have confirmed interest in QuadSense, representing 170,000 cows and $5M + $1.2/yr potential revenue. The SOM for the company is $80m in hardware and $20m in ARR in 5 years across global markets.
What we liked about the company that was really unique is that this is a real pain point for farmers (can infect and kill their cows as well as reduce how much they get paid for their milk), without an existing robust solution. The biggest competitor is their manual lab testing or installing a $30k+ solution that breaks in a milking environment. We loved Liam's solution since it was cheap, robust, easily installed by the farmers themselves and detected disease 90% of the time. It was the right combination of accuracy, price and robustness where we saw this being absorbed by the market in great quantities. Coupled with the additional sensors and more general milking tracking that they could add to their platform, it felt like this was a no brainer, and their large number of pre-orders that continue to come in validates that.
This investment fuels Bovonic's Q1 2024 product launch, further innovation, and global market expansion. By empowering farmers with early mastitis detection, Bovonic is poised to revolutionize dairy farming. Join us in supporting this groundbreaking company!
Best regards,
Mark Pavlyukovskyy, Ajay Gupta, and Glen Anderson