Why Beanstalk AgTech is launching Monsoon Ventures
A coffee farmer in West Java checks land ownership boundaries using a digital agtech tool on his smartphone
William Taing, Director, Beanstalk AgTech
Today, Beanstalk AgTech is excited to launch Monsoon Ventures, a new venture studio headquartered in Singapore. Monsoon Ventures will work alongside technical founders from Southeast Asia to commercialise agtech innovations that can improve smallholder farmer livelihoods, environmental outcomes and regional food security. We think now is the pivotal moment to be starting this work, and this post is here to explain why.
For those meeting us for the first time: Beanstalk has spent the last eight years working across the Asia Pacific agrifood ecosystem, from Vietnam to Indonesia to Australia, helping researchers, founders, and agribusinesses turn promising science into products that reach farmers. We designed and ran the Drought Venture Studio in Australia, and we have watched up close what happens when science-led technology with high potential struggles to find the right commercial pathway. Monsoon Ventures is us building on everything we learned from that experience and applying it to Southeast Asia, backed by Enterprise Singapore and Rabo Foundation, and focused initially on Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.
So why are we launching Monsoon Ventures?
There has been a decline in global agritech funding, which we wrote about in our South and Southeast Asia Agritech Report. After a peak in 2022, global venture capital funding for agrifoodtech fell sharply for the next three years. When funding retreats in such a way, an easy assumption to make is that the technology wasn't good enough.
Instead, we viewed this drop in funding as a symptom of commercialisation failure, seeing no pipeline of scale-ready, investible agtech solutions. But it’s not for a lack of trying. We have sat across the table from technical founders - scientists and engineers - with genuinely strong science, with technology that had been validated in the field, but stuck without a clearly defined pathway forward: no commercial co-founder, lack of clarity about their customers, no map of where their product fits in the value chain. Good science, blocked right at the point it could have been scaling. Capital is one part of the equation, however what is needed is a broader, systematic commercialisation response.
Why is overcoming persistent commercialisation failures in Southeast Asia crucial to building smallholder resilience?
The stakes to overcoming this problem are enormous. Southeast Asia's roughly 100 million smallholder farmers are the backbone of regional food production, and they are under mounting pressure from climate shocks, rising input costs and fragile supply chains. our conviction is that the science and technology that could ease some of this pressure already exists in the region. However, the infrastructure to get it to market: the commercial expertise, the value chain relationships, and the capital structured to match the risk profile of early-stage agtech, has been missing.
Why a venture studio model?
We strongly believe that VC funding only works for a small minority of agtech ventures, especially those that are science-led. A cheque alone does not recruit the commercial leadership a technical founder needs, does not map where a technology sits in a regional value chain, and does not prepare a venture for the investors suited to its stage and sector. A venture studio can do all three at once, working directly alongside a founder rather than assessing them from a distance. In our venture studio model, that means recruiting commercial expertise to sit alongside each technical founder, mapping where their technology fits in the regional value chain by working backward from named acquirers and distribution partners, and preparing each venture for capital readiness on a timeline suited to its own stage and sector.
This is why Monsoon Ventures exists - to provide that missing translation layer and overcome the commercialisation gap.
Why are we launching Monsoon Ventures now?
You might wonder about our timing, and of course, we considered this aspect intently. Waiting for a perfect market could have meant waiting for a signal that might not arrive for years, by which point many of the founders we most want to support, who can have the most impact on smallholder resilience, will have moved on to something else, or given up altogether. The need is urgent given the increasing risks of climate volatility and supply chain disruption, so we had to find a way to design a new type of capital model. We are deploying a blended finance model that pairs philanthropic and catalytic capital with commercial co-investment. Enterprise Singapore and Rabo Foundation backed this approach as anchor funders because it is designed for exactly this moment, when market capital alone will not price the risk of getting proven technology to smallholders at scale.
We are also seeing the green shoots of a recovery in the early-stage agritech. Cargill Ventures spent the past two years managing its existing portfolio rather than chasing new deals, but head of corporate ventures Erin VanLanduit recently said the arm is now gearing up for renewed dealmaking, having already made two unannounced investments this year. She describes the gap her team is targeting as a "second valley of death" between pilot and commercial scale, where, in her assessment, capital alone often isn't enough. That is a gap we built Monsoon Ventures to close, and a welcome sign others are ready to step towards this opportunity.
A smallholder farmer waters his crop in Thailand
Beanstalk's Drought Venture Studio supported 85 innovators in two years; so far the portfolio has raised more than AU$22 million in external funding and brought 15 agtech products and services to market. We know what is possible when science-based founders are supported to pursue a commercial pathway for their innovations. Monsoon Ventures carries that same operating discipline into Southeast Asia, adapted for its founder ecosystems, regulatory environments and smallholder value chains. Beyond the Drought Venture Studio, Beanstalk's Southeast Asia credentials come from eight years working directly in the region, including long-term engagements in Vietnam and Indonesia, and market intelligence built through relationships with USAID, the Gates Foundation and Omnivore.
We are launching today because this gap has never been more visible and the opportunity so vast. Our conviction is that the region has the science. It has the smallholder systems who need that science. What has been missing is a venture studio built to carry technology across that distance, alongside the founders doing the hard work. That is what Monsoon Ventures will do, and we could not be more excited to start building it with them.
Director William Tang meeting commercialisation stakeholders in Vietnam
