By innovateuk
From hackathon to international business success in twelve months has been the journey of a lifetime for three people who met at a Catapult event.
Francesco Liucci thought it ‘would be interesting’ to spend a couple of days exchanging ideas with software developers at a hackathon in December 2012.
Just over a year later he was waiting to hear about a major order for the software products his new company had developed that could benefit the world’s coffee growers – and drinkers.
Catapult Hackathons are designed to bring people together to exchange ideas. They are open to anyone who would like to participate – software developers, engineers, technologists, scientists, designers, artists, educators, students and entrepreneurs – anyone who has a passion for changing the world.
At the hackathon, the business analyst met software developers David and Graham Mills. The challenge set by the Catapult was to identify how space technologies and data could be used to benefit Rwanda.
Catapult Hackathons are designed to bring people together to exchange ideas. They are open to anyone who would like to participate – software developers, engineers, technologists, scientists, designers, artists, educators, students and entrepreneurs – anyone who has a passion for changing the world.
‘We were asked to improve the Rwanda Meteorology Agency website that provides weather forecasts,’ said Francesco. ‘But we essentially decided to change the challenge. Instead we came up with an app that provides recommendations to coffee farmers based on weather conditions.’
The Satellite Applications Catapult invited Francesco to join it as a business innovation analyst to help coordinate its programme designed to support small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It provides SMEs like WeatherSafe with technical expertise and data and helped organise some initial workshops with experts in satellite technology and weather observations.
The Mills brothers knew something about the coffee business because of work they had done with a specialist coffee seller in London. ‘We started to realise that one of the main problems was pest and disease and the connection between these diseases and climate, so we wanted to develop something that would give coffee growers an early warning,’ said Francesco.
Winning product WeatherSafe Coffee
That was the beginning of WeatherSafe, a start-up which is developing software to provide coffee farmers with an early-warning service, coupled with practical and targeted suggestions on the actions they should take to mitigate and prevent risks caused by the weather and climate change.
‘Our mission is to significantly increase yields and profitability from agriculture through improvements in the management of agricultural practices and intelligence,’ said Francesco.
The trio won the hackathon with their initial prototype for their first product, WeatherSafe Coffee. A few days later they were invited to present their idea at the European Space Solutions conference in London.
‘We realised something important that day as there was quite a bit of interest,’ said Francesco. It was from that date that the team were invited to work with the Satellite Applications Catapult. At that point it was just being set up by the Technology Strategy Board in Harwell, Oxfordshire, to help businesses take innovative ideas involved with space and satellite technology through to commercialisation.
The Satellite Applications Catapult invited Francesco to join it as a business innovation analyst to help coordinate its programme designed to support small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It provides SMEs like WeatherSafe with technical expertise and data and helped organise some initial workshops with experts in satellite technology and weather observations.
It’s really important. It has been very positive to have the opportunity to work with other SMEs and other projects. You can learn from the issues and challenges faced by others and add value to your own project by looking at it from a different perspective. As Otto von Bismarck once said, “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others” – Francesco Liucci
That has been invaluable for WeatherSafe. ‘It has helped us develop our business plan, to assess the opportunities in the market and plan how to move forward,’ said Francesco.
The other key to developing the company was travelling to Rwanda and Guatemala to get a first-hand view of the problems faced by coffee growers.
Solving coffee growers’ problems
Rwanda relies on coffee and tea for nearly half of its export earnings. In 2012 coffee exports were worth $60.9m, according to the National Agricultural Export Board.In Central America the coffee leaf rust disease has devastated production. In Guatemala alone it has been estimated that 70% of the coffee plants were affected in 2013 and that the damage could be even more serious in 2014. What is worse, the life cycle of the disease is up to ten years. But if experts know the conditions and the location, they can bring the plants back to a healthy condition in two to three years. ‘That’s exactly the targeted support that WeatherSafe will provide,’ said Francesco.
Those trips were vital to taking the project to the next stage of development. ‘From that point on we had a much clearer vision of the direction of the software,’ said Francesco.
WeatherSafe has developed three products which are generated by an analytical predicting model (algorithm) that compiles multiple data and knowledge sources. These can be satellite-based data; most weather forecasting is done by satellite. They can also include specific expertise from universities and research organisations and data directly retrieved from the targeted farms.
The WeatherSafe Coffee Farmer Edition (FE) product is a mobile application that operates on Apple iOS, Android and BlackBerry platforms as well as other mobile phones to take advantage of the strong mobile phone networks in many developing countries. It is the delivery system for farming intelligence provided by WeatherSafe’s predictive models and provides up-to-date, highly targeted and critical information and recommendations straight into the hands of the coffee farmers.
The ultimate aim of WeatherSafe Coffee FE is to support the transformation from subsistence farming to a professional, more profitable and sustainable business.
‘The benefits for farmers range from protecting plant health and improving coffee quality and crop yields, to optimising use of resources by improving the efficiency of farm management and operations and saving money and time by providing up-to-date intelligence on weather and other environmental events that affect coffee production,’ said Francesco.
WeatherSafe Coffee Washing Station and Co-op Edition (CE) is aimed at coffee processors such as coffee washing stations and farmers’ cooperatives. The WeatherSafe Coffee CE enables them to stay on top of all of the day-to-day operations and realise achievable production and financial targets.
Product development
The third product, WeatherSafe Coffee Government Edition (GE), is a management software package that provides government and agriculture departments, universities and non-governmental organisations with the ability to coordinate resources for the coffee industry.‘The software provides up-to-date data for field-level monitoring, yield forecasting, crop insights and decision support for daily and seasonal production decisions,’ said Francesco.
If all goes well this product could soon be on trial in Rwanda. The Rwandan National Development Board was so interested in WeatherSafe’s products that it asked them to have their prototype ready to showcase at ICT4Ag, a major agribusiness conference held in Kigali, Rwanda in November 2013.
A grant of £1,250 from the UK Trade & investment (UKTI) via the UKTI Tradeshow Access Programme Support Scheme for overseas exhibitions helped WeatherSafe to get to the exhibition. Their presence there led to a meeting with the Rwandan Minister for Agriculture.
‘We are in negotiations now. We hope this will result in a minimum of a trial and a maximum of a three-year contract,’ said Francesco.
With the negotiation in Rwanda underway, the WeatherSafe team is working already on the next step. ‘We’ve got clear requests from two countries and we are actively assessing and scoping other markets and crops where we can expand,’ said Francesco. ‘The beauty of our core solution is in fact that is it easily deployable and adaptable to different conditions.’
They wouldn’t be where they are today without the Technology Strategy Board. In June 2013 the WeatherSafe founders learned that they had been awarded a Technology Strategy Board Harwell Launchpad award. It offered them £89k worth of funding as well as business support, as long as they could match that amount from private investors. ‘It was really a great boost for the project,’ said Francesco. ‘It gave us clear timings. We had six months to get everything together and we got there.’ They expect to receive the funding this month (February 2014).
More success for WeatherSafe
In October 2013 they were also awarded £41k for research and development and office space from the European Space Agency (ESA) Business Incubation Centre (BIC) in the Harwell Campus.And it all started because of the Catapult Hackathon. ‘The Hackathon was the initiator of all the activities we have undertaken in the past year,’ said Francesco.
They will use their funding to continue to develop their products and hope to reach the important milestone of full commercialisation by the third quarter of 2014. If past performance is any guide, they may hit their target. Things have moved quickly from that first December meeting. ‘It has been quite impressive,’ said Francesco. ‘We’ve got really good momentum.’
The Mills brothers are working on software development in London while Francesco divides his time between the business development of WeatherSafe and working as business innovation analyst at the Satellite Applications Catapult. His role there means he is supporting other SMEs at the Catapult, as well as developing WeatherSafe. That kind of cross fertilisation is another major benefit.
It’s a really great environment for young British entrepreneurs – Francesco Liucci
‘It’s really important. It has been very positive to have the opportunity to work with other SMEs and other projects. You can learn from the issues and challenges faced by others and add value to your own project by looking at it from a different perspective’.
As Otto von Bismarck once said, “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”‘
Francesco is impressed by the way that the Satellite Applications Catapult aims to nurture innovation. Even the way the offices have been set up is designed to foster creativity. ‘It’s a big open office; there’s no separation between groups.
‘It’s a really great environment for young British entrepreneurs.’
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