The story began almost by chance. Like that of many other start-ups. One of the partners wanted to duplicate Farmville, the game made popular by Facebook. The other was increasingly wondering who were the owners of the pieces of uncultivated land he saw from the window on his travels and if it was possible to find a way of getting to work on these and making them productive. Fate did the rest, leading to a meeting between the two men. Andrea Guarrasi and Aren Hoxha got to know each another through work: “I noticed the presence of a young guy in the group who was exceptionally intelligent and talented”, Guarrasi says, “and I said to myself that I absolutely had to work with him”. No sooner said than done.

The goddess of farming

The story of Urban Farmer and its portal cererly.it is like many others that take place in the world of innovative businesses. Two regular jobs, the dream of “giving it a try”, the fear of the leap represented by the opening of a company. A story, though, which compared to the others, has one extra ingredient: a friendship which, over time, has gone beyond the boundaries of work to become a personal relationship.

Founded in March 2022, Cererly, the platform set up by Guarrasi and Hoxha, could be the missing link between the owner of land and the person capable of putting that land to good use.

“With Cererly we began by mapping the plots of land that could be cultivated, until we realised that these could also be used to instal renewable energy plants, obviously under certain conditions”, the founders relate. The idea was simple: “The owner registers for free on the website and enters a series of information, ranging from the existence of water to the presence of crops. In this way Cererly searches for and classifies an infinity of data and builds a large database which is then put at the disposal of businesses looking for areas that can be used for renewable energy verticals and/or farming. The advantage? Thanks to our service the scouting stage is enormously simplified and made much faster”.

Creating a business by simply following your intuition is no easy thing if you don’t have any experience. In the ocean of the Web there’s no shortage of information about how to start up an activity: but as in all cases the impact with reality turns out to be full of uncertainties. “We knew nothing at all about start-ups, pitches and MVP, we were complete ignoramuses in this area”, admits Guarrasi, thinking about the first few days. “Completely self-taught, we had to invent the first presentations. I concentrated on defining our mission and vision, while Aren focused on the aspects connected with the development of the platform and financial matters”.

The turning point arrived shortly afterwards. The two men were convinced that the idea was a good one when the website came under the spotlight of a large national daily paper that decided to talk about it. “It all happened suddenly: in the space of 24 hours after the publication of the article we experienced the first big boom in contacts, which risked crashing our website. The number of registrations increased four-fold in just one day: at that point the premises were there but we had to find a way of handling them”, the businessman says.

Careful selection

“What is more”, the founder continued, “we could only count on our own resources because from the start our idea was to make a careful selection of partners and collaborators. As a result, we rolled up our sleeves and began making a detailed analysis of the business models of all our potential competitors, updating ours on the basis of what we learnt from time to time and the market response”. 

The second crucial moment for the two friends arrived when they contacted a larger operator in the renewable energy industry. By simply using an email on Linkedin. “They expressed their interest and sent us a checklist with the characteristics of the plots of land on which they were working. Running through this, something clicked: engineers and surveyors could require up to two weeks to make their assessments. But our speciality lay in the digitalisation of processes and so we got down to work: our artificial intelligence tool can now do the work in a matter of seconds, analysing the land on the platform and creating the right match between demand and supply on the basis of a number of parameters. Just to give one or two examples: inclination, slope, radiation, distance between the connection cabins and from the renewable energy plants. We also give an expected profitability score to the plot”.

Energy, the business’s new vertical

Land with an area totalling around 80 million square meters, eight thousand hectares, is currently to be found on Cererly. The company is proudly based in Puglia, but the meeting with ARECneprix took place in Milan: the spark between the two businesses arose immediately, states Daniele Levi Formiggini, Head of Real Estate Services in the Milan company, which is part of the illimity Group. “We liked the idea and today the technology on Cererly supports our servicer, as always seeking innovative solutions to enhance the value of the assets it manages with a special emphasis on technology”, the manager continued.

The future has yet to be discovered. Also because the prospects are constantly expanding, especially in the energy sector, which is an industry in transformation. For example, through agrovoltaics, which combines solar panels with the possibility of farming. Guarrasi and Hoxha intend to include the idea of selecting and proposing plots of land suitable for any type of use, including storage, which with the renewables will become essential for the stability of the electricity network. “We provide a useful service: in Italy, around 16 million hectares of land are dedicated to agriculture”, the businessman says, “five of which are unused or abandoned, but the alarming fact is that this is increasing by around 400 thousand hectares a year. And yet only seventy thousand would be needed to obtain energy independence based on renewables, little more than around 1% of the total. Without counting the fact, he added, that when a plot of land is abandoned to a state of neglect it is much easier for it to catch fire or become an open-air rubbish dump.

Today cererly.it is working on an algorithm to recognise not only the potential of land but also that of other surfaces such as sunroofs and bodies of water that can play a role in energy transition through the installation of wind turbines. They certainly have the wind in their sails. “This project is an excellent example of how technology and data analysis can help you seize new opportunities for enhancing asset value”, Levi added. “But there’s another issue which we’re keen on and which the start-up allows us to follow, and that is sustainability: which is precisely why illimity has an energy desk specialising in investments in loans whose underlying consists of renewable-energy power plants. We have a strong belief in the “green” conversion of assets, for example by installing photovoltaic panels on roofs, and we are working to achieve more ambitious objectives that are capable of creating new value around the real estate assets we manage”.