Investors said the technology, which measures and interprets electrical signals from plants to assess their health, will improve farming sustainability and profitability.
Vivent Biosignals, a developer of technology measuring plant health, has raised €7.5m from investors including Pymwymic and Horticoop from the Netherlands and Belgium’s Agri Investment Fund (AIF).
Swiss-based Vivent provides crop health monitoring equipment that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide insights based on electrical signals produced by plants.
These allow growers to detect stress from pests, disease, drought and nutrient imbalances before visual symptoms appear. Growers can then act early to alter inputs, improve yields and improve sustainable crop protection strategies.
Pymwymic, a Dutch impact investing collective, and Horticoop, a Dutch cooperative with members from the horticultural sector, are returning investors in Vivent, having initially invested in 2023.
Pymwymic, which stands for “Put Your Money Where Your Meaning Is Community” became a co-owned impact investing cooperative in 2017 and now consists of more than 250 individuals, families, entrepreneurs and angel investors. It is investing via its Healthy Food Systems Impact Fund II, which focuses on early-stage agri-food scale-ups operating in areas such as sustainable farming, regenerative agriculture and food waste reduction.
AIF is a new investor in Vivent. The fund, established by agricultural organisation MRBB, invests in farming and horticulture companies in Flanders and German-speaking Belgium.
Carrol Plummer, Vivent’s co-founder and CEO, said the fresh investment would help the firm to build on the 2025 launch of its outdoor crop health platform, which monitors more than 1,000 hectares of crops and plants across Europe.
“With Agri Investment Fund, we gain a partner deeply embedded in European agriculture and food value chains—exactly the kind of strategic alignment we need to accelerate our growth and deliver value at scale,” she said.
Giving plants a voice
Patrik Haesen, CEO of the AIF, said Vivent’s technology effectively gave plants “a voice”, which enabled decision-making to be led by the plants themselves.
“We see enormous potential for Vivent’s technology to improve both farmer profitability and environmental sustainability,” he said.
Vivent was co-founded in 2020 by co-founders Plummer and executive chairman Nigel Wallbridge, building on research carried out over the previous decade.
The technology works by placing electrodes directly on a plant that detect ions – electric signals generated by plants in response to changes in their environment. These signals are then interpreted in real time using machine learning algorithms with results appearing on a dashboard providing growers with plant metrics, such as nutrient levels, stress signals, and environmental responses.
Vivent said recent advances in AI had allowed the technology to work with a level of precision that had previously been impossible. The platform is underpinned by what the firm said was the world’s largest library of plant electrophysiology recordings to allow it to improve diagnostic accuracy and add new crops to its database.
