Growth on the agenda for Glas Data with £141K support from CIOSIF

Cornish agri-tech business Glas Data has received £141K funding to help deliver growth, as it continues to develop its universal dashboard to make data management easier for farmers and food producers. The equity funding comes from the Cornwall & Isles of Scilly Investment Fund (CIOSIF).

The company’s co-founders, Colin Phillipson and Rob Sanders, started Glas Data when they met on Falmouth University’s Launchpad MA Entrepreneurship course. Glas Data has developed GlasCore, a simple to use dashboard that pulls all of the data a farmer or food producer needs into one easy to use screen, which can be viewed on the go via mobile phone or tablet.

Technology is developing rapidly, allowing farmers to collect data on everything from weather and soil nutrients to animal health. With so much data now available, the challenge is how to make it accessible and easy to understand, so that it helps farmers make decisions, saving them both time and money. That is where the GlasCore dashboard comes in. The cloud-based solution can be set up to display the information, alerts and trends that a particular agriculture business needs.

“There is a lot of pressure on farmers and food producers to become more efficient and increase productivity. Adopting technology is crucial, but there is a risk that the amount of data generated by new technology will become overwhelming. Our GlasCore dashboard helps by pulling all of the data about a farm or food production business into one easy to use and simple to understand screen,” says Colin Phillipson, Co-Founder of Glas Data.

Glas Data will use the funding from Cornwall & Isles of Scilly Investment Fund to deliver growth through research and development and customer acquisition.

“The funding from the Cornwall & Isles of Scilly Investment Fund comes at a perfect time for Glas Data. We’ve had an incredibly busy few years since we set up the business in 2018 and we now employ seven people. The funding will help with the next stage of our growth, allowing us to focus on research and development and customer acquisition,” adds Colin Phillipson.

The £40m Cornwall & Isles of Scilly Investment Fund provides debt and equity finance from £25,000 to £2 million to help growing small businesses across the region. It has been established by the British Business Bank in partnership with the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) and is operated by appointed fund managers The FSE Group.

CIOSIF is supported financially by the European Union using funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) as part of the European Structural and Investment Funds Growth Programme 2014-2020.