Making sense of business-critical market data is a costly, time-intensive process, which begins with finding the data – internal and external. The challenge continues with the identification of the variables that matter, measuring them correctly, and acting. As the Agriculture and Food Supply Chain is fragmented with many contributors and a large geographic reach, industry participants need a better comprehensive solution to the challenge of measuring what matters. Supply chain optimization is vital for multiple industries and farmers. Farmers are on the losing end of the supply chain and Martha Montoya has seen it firsthand across the world.
Martha started her career in the agricultural industry while sourcing ingredients from the Americas to New Zealand, Australia, and Thailand, which provided her with the knowledge of the product from source to delivery.
Currently, Martha is steering the ship of Agtools as a CEO. Agtools provides business-critical access to accurate, objective, and frequently updated real-time market data along with the performance applications and monitoring systems to provide management with the tools to develop, implement and monitor business initiatives and results. Agtools improves profitability through Actionable Market Data. The clients of Agtools benefit from data points for each link in the supply chain to improve their category and the performance of each function inside the organization.
Experience in Agriculture and Food Supply Chain
Martha has been in the agriculture and food supply chain industry for the last 27 years. She has been boots on the ground by doing the crops and working with the farmers. Furthermore, she brought in her two brothers, who helped her in the technical aspects of the idea.
Agtools is a market business intelligence product. The company basically delivers market data which helps farmers and buyers to make decisions. It takes data from government entities across the world. Most of its programs are in Pascal and Cobol programming languages. Agtools reprogram the data into a simpler form. As the company understands the industry, it is able to put the data in context. Farmers and Buyers look for market data to act on that data and make macro decisions.
In simpler terms, as a worldwide SaaS platform, Agtools gathers real-time government and institutional data of over 500 specialty crop commodities, scraping it, including algorithms and M/L for farmers, buyers, and everyone on the supply chain to see and decide how to manage their forecasting and purchase orders.
An Entrepreneur of the Future
According to Martha, as a businesswoman, one needs to learn how to read financials. She says the world moves with money, profit and losses, cash flows, and projections. Martha was not much aware of financials initially until she heard from a woman who runs 25 businesses, “If you don’t know your cost per unit, you’re doomed in the business.”
Martha mentions that the Women in Cloud Microsoft Cloud Accelerator helped her shape her professional and personal journey. The community of leaders and mentors helped her grasp entrepreneurship better. She says Women in Cloud knows best in building frameworks and programs for entrepreneurs like her to empower them. After her accelerator journey, her company fundraised over 1.45 million on seed round, acquired yearly contracts with the largest foodservice, the largest fruit/vegetable companies in the world, and more. It also acquired cybersecurity certification and hired five more rural engineers in the US. Agtools is now fundraising 10 million and is very confident because of the enterprise growth path Martha was taught in Women in Cloud. Martha says that the community resulted in new friendships, connections, and interactions that will stay with her for the rest of the time.
Envisioning to Expand the Scope of Services
Agtools has a lot of work with around 600 million farmers in the world. Martha wants to focus on the United States market for the next five to ten years after which she wants to launch global operations to help farmers all around the world. She believes that she and her team have to understand how the world moves, so they can help the farmers farm better in the countries worldwide.
Martha Montoya, CEO, Agtools Inc
