Meet Agxes — A Demo Day 12 Presenting Startup

This year, Fintech Sandbox Demo Day will take place on Tuesday, April 28. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Victoria Tostado Bringas, Co-founder and CEO of Cambridge-based fintech Agxes. Agxes is bringing artificial intelligence to agricultural lending, using it to help bridge the gap between bankers and farmers.

Victoria, tell us a bit about Agxes. What problems are you solving?

At Agxes, we are tackling the inefficiencies and system challenges in agricultural lending. Today, the process for farmers can take anywhere between 30-90 days. For farmers, we solve for a:

• Very long lending process
• Compliance hurdles
• Little standardization

For lenders, we offer:

• Operations optimization
• New sources of income

What is your company’s origin story?

I have been a farmer for 7 years and have firsthand experience of the ag lending process and the difficulty of translating operational data to financials. Also, I have been and independent consultant for a development bank. Having the opportunity to work from both perspectives, I knew I wanted to solve this global problem.

I met Oscar Guardado, our CTO, at MIT. He is a national physics olympiad absolut gold medalist working in ag-tech, so the timing was right.

What is different about agronomic data?

• Domain expertise is required to match it with finance risk models.
• There are unique data sources, for example: water availability, soil quality, weather, market movements, satellite imagery, that give a more full picture of the biological process of farming – everything affects the potential future revenue of a farmer, and therefore more sophisticated risk models are needed.

Which Fintech Sandbox Data Partner have you worked with?

We have worked with Equifax, using their Sandbox to explore their credit data and integrating credit reports into the lending workflow, evaluating behavior for ag loan repayment models.

We’ve always had farmers. How can it be that agriculture lending has some of the highest operational costs among the US banking services?

The complexity of the process and the kind of data that is analyzed go beyond financials. There are more variables and more analysis required – doing this in a manual way makes costs high.

Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?

We are supported; we walk along this incredible team that is always there to guide us and support our next phase.

What milestones has Agxes achieved so far?

• Working with a customer in CA
• Academic collaboration with Virginia Tech to enhance agriculture- finance ecosystem regionally
• Main metrics – time reduction, improvement of credit quality

What’s next for Agxes?

• Farmer’s wallet – financial infrastructure for capital deployment, improve models with more high quality data.
• Keep growing in partnerships with banking and non-banking financial institutions across the US.

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To hear more about Agxes and five other exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for Fintech Sandbox Demo Day 12!