Global specialty minerals company ICL Group has led an investment round in Agrematch, an Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) agritech startup, through its ICL Planet Startup Hub innovation and investment platform.

The two companies agreed to launch a joint, multiyear program using Agrematch’s AI system to discover novel crop nutrition solutions in a strategic partnership with ICL Growing Solutions, the agriculture division of ICL, which is headquartered in Tel Aviv and has 125 offices worldwide.

Founded in 2017, Agrematch has been developing and refining its unique AI4AI – Artificial Intelligence for Active Ingredients platform that is expected to produce proprietary bio-stimulants and plant nutrition products. The ultimate goal is optimizing overall plant and soil health and maximizing plant yield, quality and resilience.

“ICL’s partnership with Agrematch brings the rapidly evolving application of AI into ICL’s agricultural development ecosystem,” noted Hadar Sutovsky, vice president of external innovation and general manager of ICL Planet Startup Hub.

“Agrematch’s AI4AI prediction platform has the potential to streamline our compound discovery process, reduce the time and costs involved, and lead to the development of more effective and efficient crop solutions.”

“We are excited to partner with ICL and explore new solutions for plant nutrition,” said Eyal Ben-Chanoch, CEO of Agrematch.

“Using data science, and especially AI, has helped us to dramatically alter the discovery process, by eliminating both its sequential nature and the barriers that make the classical high-throughput screening methods costly, risky and time consuming. Our AI4AI platform was designed and built to discover new functional compounds that meet defined specifications.”