July 20, 2020. London, ON and Guelph, ON. RH Accelerator Inc. and OAFT, (Ontario Agri-Food Technologies) announce they are beginning a strategic alliance to share resources and create synergy to support early stage innovative companies.
Both organizations recognize the exploding opportunity and need to foster innovation in the agriculture and food sector. Using their deep domain knowledge and entrepreneurial expertise, they will to play a more meaningful role as they scale up and activate the ecosystem of high potential companies and investors.
“We are excited about adding OAFT’s 23 years of knowledge, network and reputation to our founder programming already being delivered to the RHA companies.“ says Joe Dales, Co Founder at RH Accelerator Inc. “While RH Accelerator is a relatively young company, we have made almost 20 investments and our new private virtual community has grown to over 500 members - founders, mentors, investors and business professionals.”
RH Accelerator Inc. is currently raising a private RHA fund with accredited investors using the Angelist.co system so it can make future seed round investments in additional early stage innovative companies.
Tyler Whale, President at OAFT says “We are looking forward to working with the experienced RH Accelerator team to expand our impact and enable more companies to gain access to needed resources such as financing, highly accomplished mentoring, deep business intelligence and expanded networks in our collaboration with RH Accelerator. The combined resources will significantly improve the growth prospects and probability of success for early stage innovators.“
According to AgFunder’s latest Agri-FoodTech Investing Report, $19.8 billion has been invested in AgriFood tech across 1,858 deals in 2019. The report covers the wide range of agri food innovations, eGrocers and restaurants to farming agtech, ag biotech, farm robotics and equipment, bioenergy and biomaterials. The OAFT and RH Accelerator leaders want to attract a greater share of that investment to our expanding cluster.
RH Accelerator Inc. is a privately held company that makes long term value adding hands on investments in early stage innovative companies. RHA helps these promising companies much like the Y Combinator model, leveraging our founders & partners’ business experience, skills, extensive networks and financial resources. For more information visit www.RHAccelerator.com
OAFT, (Ontario Agri-Food Technologies) is a not-for-profit ag-tech accelerator based in Guelph, ON, comprised of members from grower associations, academia, industry and government. Its focus is to assist Ontario businesses and entrepreneurs in the agri-food and agri-tech sector, by providing access to needed networks, funding and domain expertise. For more information www.OAFT.org
Contacts:
Joe Dales
Co Founder, President Agri & Food Innovation
RH Accelerator Inc.
519 495 - 1858
Email: joe.dales@rhaccelerator.com
Tyler Whale
President
OAFT
519 400 - 9884
Email: tyler@oaft.org