Saudi agric, livestock company, SALIC, leads £7m Hummingbird investment  round

Saudi Arabia-owned agricultural and livestock investment company, SALIC,
has announced that it has led investment round into Hummingbird
Technologies, a global leader in remote sensing, artificial intelligence, machine  learning and dataanalytics for agriculture.

The value of the investment round is put at £7,000,000 and it is
described as “strategic investment.”

Khaled Al-Aboodi, the managing director of SALIC said the company in
making the investment aims to be a world-class agribusiness investment company focusing on food security.

“Making sizeable, meaningful and scalable investments and investing in
new Ag Tech projects such as Hummingbird will mobilize us to reach our strategic objectives,”Al-Aboodi said.

Also commenting, Matthew Jansen, who is SALIC chief executive officer,
said: “We see Hummingbird as an attractive investment from our global portfolio’s point of view and see  it as a means of driving and accelerating
innovative best practice adoption across our global farmland production
operation.”

In his response, Will Wells, chief executive officer of Hummingbird
Technologies, said his company was thrilled to announce what he called “this transformative equity deal” for the company, which he said,  includes a global commercial dynamic to roll out Hummingbird’s offering on an unprecedented scale.

SALIC is owned by the Public Investment Fund of the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia, operating since 2012 and has been investing in several countries including Canada, Australia, Brazil and Ukraine. Hummingbird  Technologies, founded at the Imperial College Technology Incubator by William Wells in 2016, is a global leader in remote sensing, artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analytics for agriculture.