Local AI crop insurance platform Hillridge attracts global interest

Award winning Hillridge Technology, a Sydney-based AI crop insurance platform for farmers, has a new seed funding round underway as it fields international interest.

Hillridge launched last year in Australia with Marsh, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance and distributor Nutrien and recently joined Insurtech Australia as a member after winning global startup competition the Extreme Tech Challenge last year.

Hillridge’s platform helps farmers buy affordable weather insurance against risks local insurers may not cover, such as drought, frost, heat and too much rain.

“We’ve got some big plans. We’re finding we’ve got way more opportunities than we’ve got funds for, so we are in the middle of raising our seed fund at the moment,” co-founder and CEO Dale Schilling, the son of a Victorian wheat and sheep farmer said.

“We are really in the thick of it. We received a non-binding term sheet a couple of days ago and we’re working through that. So it’s very exciting,” Mr Schilling told attendees at the InsurtechLIVE last week.

Hillridge’s corporate partnerships led to a snowball effect in offshore interest in the technology, which takes weather data, machine learning, and personalisation based on farmers’ production to provide insurance and self-executing contracts based on blockchain.

“What surprised us was their global colleagues are now reaching out to us and saying ‘Hey, can we apply that technology to Vietnam, or Indonesia, or even the UK?’ where, because of Brexit, their farm subsidies are coming to an end.”

The startup was recently awarded a $US200,000 ($277,362) grant by the NEAR Foundation to develop a blockchain-based parametric insurance platform for tropical storms, to be piloted on typhoons in Vietnam.

After witnessing how vulnerable his father was to weather, Mr Schilling examined hedging based on Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) data to offset potential farm and crop losses, forming Hillridge.

“I just wanted to prove to myself that there was a reason why there should be this gap in the market and then just leave it at that – scratch that itch and go back to being a management consultant – but the more farmers we spoke to, the more we realised the system has been fundamentally broken,” he said.

“There’s so much opportunity there.” While half the farmers approached were willing to pay for insurance, cover was not readily available, he says, with a “big mismatch” between the local insurers who had the best access to farmers but were not able to extend their risk profile, versus global insurers interested in Australian agriculture as it offsets the risk in their portfolio, but lacking access to farmers.

Hillridge says its mission is to help farmers mitigate the financial impact of poor weather on their crops or livestock, in a way that goes “well beyond existing crop or livestock insurance”.

“We take weather data, machine learning and mass-personalisation based on what, where and when the farmer is producing, parametric insurance and self-executing contracts to offer farmers greater peace of mind about the one big thing they can’t control: bad weather,” it says.