At the first Rural Startup Awards, one of the winners was the Asturian start-up ‘Agrolinera’, which develops technologies to improve the lives of cheesemakers and livestock farmers by valorising their waste and helping them join the circular economy.
The Asturian start-up Agrolinera, a technology platform for the collection, logistics and valorisation of livestock and dairy waste, has won the first Rural Startup Awards in the ‘Sustainability’ category. The award, presented by Vanessa Jaklitsch, Director of Communication, Marketing and Institutional Relations at EOI, was collected by Verónica Menéndez, CEO and founder of Agrolinera.
The jury, made up of leaders from the entrepreneurial ecosystem and representatives of public and private organisations from various disciplines, assessed the more than 200 applications received against criteria such as the degree of innovation and disruption, the project’s growth and maturity, and its business model and impact.
What is Agrolinera?
Founded in Llanera (Asturias) in 2022, Agrolinera specialises in collecting livestock waste in smallholding communities. It digitalises the collection of whey and slurry bound for biogas plants, making collection efficient, preserving its value and enabling these farms to grow and be profitable without causing problems for their surroundings.
Agrolinera’s patented system uses collection points fitted with sensors connected to a cloud platform via IoT. These points are adapted to the type of waste, the territory and how it will be valorised. The platform makes it possible to monitor the waste in real time, coordinate its collection efficiently and certify its movements using blockchain. This guarantees traceability from source, monitors and preserves the characteristics of the waste and prevents environmental nuisance, helping livestock farming coexist with activities such as rural tourism.
Its CEO and founder, Verónica Menéndez, holds a degree in Business Administration and Management from the University of Oviedo, a master’s in environmental management from EOI and a master’s in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania (USA). She ran several companies in energy generation and corporate services before embarking on Agrolinera. She is convinced: “Asturias must be the mirror in which Europe’s traditional livestock farming sees its future”.
Inspired by the success of the Women Startup Awards, the Rural Startup Awards were created to build role models in rural areas and close the territorial gap in innovative entrepreneurship. For Carlos Mateo, president of the Asociación Española de Startups (Spanish Startup Association), innovation and technology are part of the solution to depopulation: “We can reverse this trend and foster development and attract talent to rural communities. Our goal is to create role models who can be real agents of change and contribute to the growth of local economies”.
The Rural Startup Awards, organised by the Asociación Española de Startups and the agency Yellow, aim to become the first accelerator for rural talent, offering resources, visibility and investment to the most outstanding start-ups.
Source: https://www.ecoticias.com/residuos-reciclaje/rural-startup-awards-agrolinera