Demetria, a Bogota, Columbia- and Herzliya, Israel-based AI-powered taste and quality intelligence SaaS startup for the coffee supply chain, emerged from stealth after closing a $3m seed funding round.
The round was led by LatAm-Israeli investor Celeritas and a group of private investors including Mercantil Colpatria, the investment branch of Grupo Colpatria, a player in the Colombian financial sector.
Led by co-founder and CEO Felipe Ayerbe, Demetria has developed a data cloud to identify and track coffee quality with full traceability throughout the commodity’s value chain, powering producers and roasters with insights that impact the livelihoods of coffee farmers. Utilizing portable near infra-red (NIR) sensors to analyze and fingerprint green coffee beans for biochemical markers, the company has created an AI-based data intelligence platform that accurately matches each bean profile according to the industry standard coffee flavor wheel.
Demetria is using the funds to launch its suite of SaaS-based solutions after completing a pilot with Carcafe, the Colombian coffee division of Volcafe/ED&F Man, one of the world’s oldest and largest agricultural commodity traders. The company is also working with Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (FNC), the Colombian National Federation for Coffee Growers, to develop a series of apps that help farmers and their transaction points in the supply chain to control and track bean quality, and price it accordingly.
Former investment banker and consultant, Bogota-based Felipe Ayerbe co-founded Demetria together with Argentine-Israeli serial high-tech entrepreneur and angel investor Eduardo Shoval; Salomon Kassin, a commodity trading expert and pioneer of Colombia’s speciality coffee industry and serial high tech entrepreneur Yori Nelken, a pioneer of AI’s Natural Language Processing.
FinSMEs
02/03/2021