It’s easy for farmers to get lost in the ever-growing maze of subsidy rules, farm assurance schemes, and sustainability requirements. That’s exactly why Regeno was created. Spun out of Founders Factory and Nesta’s venture builder programme just over a year ago, the company has evolved from its original mission of helping small and medium-sized farms access government support to tackling the broader challenge of compliance and record-keeping across the agricultural sector.
ATN sat down with CEO and co-founder Sven Poppelman to discuss the company’s early pivot and how its AI-driven approach is reshaping what farm assurance could look like.
ATN: What’s the idea behind Regeno?
We started as a way of lowering the bar for small and medium-sized farmers to access farming subsidies. So there was the SFI [UK government] scheme that got shut down in March. That then shut down our original business, which was using tech to find the right stack of funding options for farms.
We went through a couple of pivots, and the main line now is farm assurance and record-keeping to help farmers implement the actions needed for assurance schemes. We’re interested in lowering the friction and making it really clear how to be accountable to the different schemes that you might be in as a food grower or producer.
ATN: How does a farmer work with you?
It’s a tech product they sign up to. They onboard the shape of their farm and then upload their agreements and basically overlay the set of actions onto that farm map.
ATN: Why do they need it?
The value for the farmer is lowering the risk of losing their subsidy. But the bit we’ve found real traction on is with consultants and land agents who have responsibility for getting farms into those sustainability assurance schemes and making sure they stay compliant.
A consultant could be managing anywhere from 30 to 100 properties, and so trying to stay on top of all the different scheme requirements for all your different farms is either an exercise in being really good at Excel or having a photographic memory.
ATN: So your customers are typically consultants rather than farmers?
Yes, because we’ve lowered the friction on collecting evidence as well as filing and reporting the evidence. That’s been massive for consultants.
The other area we are finding interest in is buyers, as a system of record for their partners. So for some barley growers in Scotland, for example, this is a great way for them to be accountable for their practices and to prove sustainability practices like cover cropping.
ATN: What does the farmer need to do themselves to feed into the system?
If they pull up their farm on the system, they see their parcels [of land] and if there’s any work to be done linked to any schemes. So, for example, in one field there might be 10 actions and 15 pieces of evidence to submit.
So rather than reading a really dense and horrible PDF file with codes and dates and areas, we can tell them what the evidence requirements are for each.
What is pretty unique is if you have something like a soil test report, uploading one test will satisfy the requirements for multiple agreements or schemes.
ATN: Is there IP behind any of this? What stops someone coming along and programming the same system?
Our advantage is we’ve heavily used AI to lower the friction beyond digital paperwork and record-keeping solutions. Most importantly, we’ve used AI to map unstructured data like conversations and videos into structured data. A farming consultant or farmer, for example, could record themselves talking about a hedgerow and turn that into a structured hedgerow survey. No one else has done that yet.
We’ve been able to build all of this in a short space of time because my tech lead is basically the tech equivalent of God. He’s incredible, and I try not to let him cross the road without at least five people protecting him.
ATN: Just in the UK?
Yes, although there are schemes everywhere that require documentation and evidence, so there’s nothing limiting us from being international.
ATN: Is the government and the schemes happy with it being done this way?
At the end of the day, we’re not circumventing any existing systems. The information still needs to be submitted by the farmer using the official channels.
We sat down with the RPA [Rural Payments Agency – the UK’s farming subsidies body] with an early product, and they had to go away and think about what it means because they’d never actually thought someone would come along and do compliance in this way.
ATN: And you’re currently raising?
Yes, I’m looking to raise and really pour fuel onto this fire because we’ve got some traction, we’ve got validation that people are willing to pay for it, and we’ve got the direction of travel that’s really set.
So finding like-minded investors, some farmer investors, and a few more institutional investors, although it might be a little bit too early for us to be there.
