Land O'Lakes, Inc. and UrtheCast Corp. today announced they have entered a binding term sheet for the purchase of Geosys Technology Holding LLC ("Geosys"), a wholly owned subsidiary of Land O'Lakes, Inc.
The closing of the transaction is subject to due diligence, respective board approvals and other conditions customary for transactions of this nature. Upon closing, UrtheCast will take ownership of Geosys’ software for accessing, processing, cataloguing and retrieving of images.
As part of the transaction, Land O’Lakes, through its WinField United crop inputs and insights business, will retain ownership of all intellectual property connected to its R7® Tool and farm-gate applications. Additionally, UrtheCast will offer expanded support to WinField United’s suite of ag tech tools by providing the same services currently offered by Geosys along with additional data through the UrtheDaily constellation currently in development.
“At Land O’Lakes, we are constantly looking for the best ways to provide long-term support to our member-owners and our customers,” said Beth Ford, President and CEO of Land O’Lakes, Inc. “This agreement enhances our proprietary R7 Tool’s ability to identify the right places for farmers to make incremental in-season input investments to drive yields and profitability -- in real time.”
With more than 30 years of industry experience, Geosys provides clients with the data, analysis and insights needed to make more informed decisions. Separately, UrtheCast Corp. is a Vancouver-based technology company that serves the rapidly evolving geospatial and geoanalytics markets with a wide range of information-rich products and services. The combination of the two brings unprecedented value to agribusinesses worldwide through the enhanced relationship between imagery data and geoanalytical solutions.
“This important acquisition brings together the best-in-class imagery capabilities of UrtheCast with the proven geoanalytics power and deep agribusiness industry relationships of Geosys. As the only unified company capable of providing a fully integrated geoanalytics data solution to the agribusiness industry, UrtheCast is well positioned to bring unprecedented capabilities to customers across a global value chain that spans from retailers to insurance companies, banks and commodity trading houses,” said Donald Osborne, CEO of UrtheCast. “By enabling us to realize an immediate expansion of our capability set, customer footprint and revenue stream, the addition of Geosys strengthens our business while moving UrtheCast another step closer to the launch of the groundbreaking UrtheDaily constellation.”
The first closing is expected to by Nov. 6, 2018, and full completion of the transaction is expected in approximately 24 months.