Farmnote takes undisclosed funding to build AI agents for dairy farms

Farmnote takes undisclosed funding to build AI agents for dairy farms

6 October 2026: Farmnote, a dairy and livestock software company based in Obihiro, Hokkaido, has sold new shares to two impact investment funds in a round whose size it has not disclosed. Impact Capital's first fund leads. The second investor is the Social X Impact Investment fund, run jointly by Social X and QR Investment. The company's own release says the share issue took place on 28 September 2026.

Not yet independently verified. The amount raised is not disclosed. The company release is in Japanese; the English summary at The Bridge agrees with it. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Three pressures on Japanese dairy farming

Farmnote describes three pressures arriving together: a falling and ageing farm workforce, higher feed and material costs, and the difficulty of managing larger herds. It says a farm's resilience does not necessarily rise with the number of cattle. Its answer is to link data from the barn to management decisions.

What the products cover today

Farmnote Cloud, its herd management system, covers about 380,000 cattle, which the company puts at about a tenth of the domestic market. Farmnote Color is a collar-mounted wearable that detects signs of oestrus and illness in real time. Farmnote Gene is a genomic testing service that supports breeding decisions from a herd's genetic ability. In July 2026 the company announced support for the Model Context Protocol, so that generative AI tools can read herd data directly.

At present, the company says, farmers read and use each data source themselves. The planned change is an AI agent that brings the data together to support production and farm management.

Running its own farms to test the software

Farmnote differs from most software vendors in that it owns farms that use its tools. Its subsidiary, Farmnote Dairy Platform, manages two farms of its own in Hokkaido and takes part in running six farms in the region, including operations it runs under contract for others. The company says it is turning the operating know-how from those farms into a system it can offer to contracted producers.

The new money is earmarked for strengthening the business as a whole, developing the AI agents and expanding the group's farm operations and contract management. The release also says the lead investor worked with Farmnote on a logic model of its social impact and a draft set of impact indicators before investing.

The company, founded in November 2013, describes its business as an IoT and AI platform for dairy and livestock. In the release, chief executive Shinya Kobayashi says the two funds will speed up the company's aim of creating what the Japanese release calls "the brain of world agriculture" (our translation).

Company profile on TrustList: Farmnote

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Sources

• Farmnote via PR TIMES: Farmnote carries out a third-party allotment to two impact investment funds (in Japanese), 6 October 2026
• The Bridge: Farmnote Secures Funding from Impact Capital for Dairy Farm AI Development, 7 October 2026