From Pilot to Scale – Co-innovating with Southeast Asian Startups to Responsibly Feed the World and Protect the Planet

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About Thryve Innovation

The future of agriculture will not be created by any one company alone. Through Thryve, we're building Yara's innovation engine to identify, test, and scale breakthrough technologies and partnerships worldwide.

Find out more here!

Session synopsis

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Decarbonising agriculture is a systems problem across farmers, input providers, distributors and retailers, and no single actor can move the needle alone.

Yara's response is Thryve – its first global innovation hub, co-located with Yara’s Africa & Asia regional headquarters – built to shorten the path from idea to impact with partnership as an enabler.

This session unpacks how that works in practice.

Thryve will walk through its three main pathways to market with startups: (i) open innovation challenges that crowd in solutions to sharply defined industry problems, (ii) a 12-week "field and forum" accelerator that pairs founders with Yara's agronomic knowledge, soil data and distribution network to de-risk scaling and (iii) a structured scouting program to identify promising startups and breakthrough innovation in our priority areas.

The session closes with where Thryve sees the biggest openings for Southeast Asian startups working on decarbonization and emerging technologies – and what Thryve looks for in a partner.

The platform behind it: Thryve Open Innovation Challenge

• Yara's global open innovation platform, run in partnership with IMDA, Singapore's lead agency in digital industry and our initiative partner starting in 2025

• Challenge focus: automated, cost-efficient, scalable data collection of accurate smallholder farm boundaries under 2 hectares.

• Scale: open globally 7 July – 15 August 2025, with S$80,000 in prototype funding.

• Why it matters for decarbonisation and sustainability: Accurate field-level smallholder farm boundary data is the foundation for more precise nutrient application (less over-application, lower emissions), and unlocks downstream applications in areas such as agri-financing.

• Received Interest: The challenge drew 43 applications from nearly 15 countries, including over 50% of them being AI and sustainability-related solutions from across Southeast Asia — a useful proof point that the SEA innovation ecosystem is engaging directly with agri-decarbonisation problems.

• Who did we select: An Asian geospatial analytics company with deep expertise in satellite imagery and machine learning. India-based solver, with the collaboration deploying into Southeast Asia.

• What's being built currently: Co-developing a prototype mapping smallholder farm boundaries at meaningful accuracy and a fraction of the cost of traditional methods, targeting to start in Thailand.

• The collaboration model: Yara brings the commercial problem, agronomic domain knowledge, ground-truthing capacity through access to real farms and farmers across Southeast Asia, and potential route to market. The solver brings the AI-driven boundary detection technology. The result is a solution that is commercially relevant from day one rather than a pilot in search of a use case.

Opportunity #1: Seeking cross-border innovation and partnership efforts in focus areas

Thryve accelerates Yara’s cross-border innovation and partnership efforts in these focus areas and beyond:

• Sustainable Food Production

• AI

• Technologies for Decarbonization in Food & Agriculture

• New Chemical Compounds in Production

Areas of Interest & expertise

The future of agriculture will not be created by any one company alone. Through Thryve, we're building Yara's innovation engine to identify, test, and scale breakthrough technologies and partnerships worldwide. Singapore gives us a unique platform to connect global innovation with the needs of farmers and food systems across Yara.

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