Agdatahub is over. The French company, publisher of an agricultural and agri-food data intermediation platform, was placed in liquidation by decision of the Paris Commercial Court on December 3, 2024, after the observation of a cessation of payments in October 2024. It was last November that the Board of Directors and then the General Assembly unanimously voted for the placement of the company, as part of a request to open judicial liquidation.
Share data securely
A brief look back at the history of Agdatahub. The company was born in 2016, under the name ApiAgro and under the impetus of Acta – which represents agricultural technical institutes – and the Permanent Assembly of Chambers of Agriculture (APCA). The initial objective was to develop a platform for sharing and exploiting data generated by the agricultural sector. All in a secure approach and with respect for confidentiality.
In 2020, ApiAgro became Agdatahub in order to better reflect its mission as a “hub”, that is to say a place to centralize data. Also, the company was registered under the status of simplified joint stock company (SAS). On the financing side, two fundraising events were carried out: one in November 2020 for 2.5 million euros and the other in March 2023 for 4.8 million euros. Among the shareholders were the agricultural holding company API-Agro, Banque des Territoires, Avril, InVivo and IN Groupe.
“We were missing a few months”
“We were a data intermediary, within the meaning of the Digital Governance Act (DGA), that is to say a neutral actor who allows data sources to be linked“, explains Gaëlle Cheruy Pottiau, former consulting director at Agdatahub, requested by the Data Protection Club. In a message posted on the LinkedIn network on January 6, 2025, she regrets the end of the company and its project. “We were barely a few months away from having significant feedback on the projects underway in France. To show that it was possible to consolidate the collection of production data from agricultural management software via a data intermediary, while respecting the consent of the farmer for each use of his data“, she wrote.
“The State has not kept its commitments“, she regrets to The Digital Factory. It explains: last July, the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty announced the transition of the company Agdatahub to public governance, by becoming one of the shareholders. On this occasion, he also announced that the first use cases of data sharing would be deployed by the end of 2024, particularly in animal genetics, the beef industry, agrofuels, agroecology and the wine sector.
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