Kubota Corporation (Headquarters: Naniwa-ku, Osaka, Japan; President and Representative Director: Yuichi Kitao; hereinafter, "Kubota") announced today that it has taken a stake in Efos, a Slovenian agritech business which has developed “Trapview”. Trapview was originally founded in 2007 in Slovenia and holds an expertise in monitoring of pests. With thousands of traps deployed in fields, the company currently owns the largest database of pest data and algorithms in the world.

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Background and investment rationale

• In a bid to promote open innovation through partnerships with external organizations, Kubota established in 2019 the Innovation Center in Japan and Europe as divisions for the creation of new business ventures, products and services.
• The recent investments in three startups have allowed Kubota to deepen its knowledge of advanced agritech and its business models, thus accelerating the development of its solution business in the agriculture sector.
• Trapview is an advanced service for "pest control," which significantly affects the yields ofthe crops. With automated traps placed throughout farms, they not only capture pest insects but also use pictures sent from the traps to provide data, which is then analyzed by an AI-generated algorithm to predict pest occurrences. Without this service and because pest insects grow quickly, it has been difficult to spray chemicals in a timely and effective manner. By combining massive database of pest data and algorithms, however, Trapview achieves highly accurate predictions, thus assisting growersin taking timely and pertinent action.
• Kubota expects that the investment will accelerate innovation in the monitoring and forecasting of pests, offering and efficient solution for farmers and continue driving its extensive experience in preventing the spread of pests and infections.

About Efos

Company name	Efos d.o.o
Establishment	2007
Location	Hruševje, Slovenia
Business	Provision of a pest insect monitoring and forecasting platform which, due to the Advanced artificial intelligence based processing of trap data, assists customers to get accurate and real-time understanding of pest population dynamics as well as forecast of pest development stages in a specific area. This positions Trapview as a key decision support tool for planning field activities and for optimal usage of crop protection.

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