Monsanto to acquire climate data science company The Climate Corp for $930 mn

US biotechnology giant Monsanto Company yesterday said that it would buy climate data science company The Climate Corp for $930 million

The acquisition will combine The Climate Corp's expertise in agriculture analytics and risk-management with Monsanto's R&D capabilities, and will provide farmers access to more information about the many factors that affect the success of their crops.

The Climate Corp was founded in 2006 by a team of software engineers and data scientists formerly with Google and other leading Silicon Valley technology companies.

Since then, the company has built the agriculture industry's most advanced technology platform combining hyper-local weather monitoring, agronomic data modeling, and high-resolution weather simulations to deliver a complete suite of full-season monitoring, analytics and risk-management products.

The company's proprietary technology platform combines hyper-local weather monitoring, agronomic data modeling, and high-resolution weather simulations to deliver climate.com, a SaaS solution that helps farmers improve their profits by making better informed operating and financing decisions, and Total Weather Insurance, an insurance offering that pays farmers automatically for bad weather that may impact their profits.

The company is also an authorised provider of the US Federal crop insurance program, enabling authorized independent crop insurance agents to provide farmers with the industry's most powerful full-stack risk management solution.

In the face of increasingly volatile weather, the global $3 trillion agriculture industry depends on the company's unique technologies to help stabilise and improve profits.

''The Climate Corporation is focused on unlocking new value for the farm through data science,'' said Hugh Grant, chairman and CEO of Monsanto. ''Everyone benefits when farmers are able to produce more with fewer resources. The Climate Corporation team brings leading expertise that will continue to greatly benefit farmers and their bottom-line, and we want to expand upon this tremendous work and broaden their reach to more crops and more world areas.''

St Louis-based Monsanto said that the acquisition represents a natural extension of its vision to increase crop productivity, conserve more of the planet's natural resources and expand The Climate Corp's capabilities in data science, agriculture's next major growth frontier, an area that represents a potential opportunity of $20 billion beyond Monsanto's core focus.