AgriTech are “advanced technological products and services that increase productivity and reduce environmental impact”, according to the website of SummitAgro, a Chilean agricultural inputs company. Similarly, on the website of BPI France, the French public investment bank, we can read that AgriTech start-ups “propose breakthrough innovations and provide more efficient, environmentally-friendly solutions”. We observe positive discourses and a variety of support instruments from both public and private actors, as well as a global increase in the interest of venture capital and private equity in the agrifood sector (Lajoie-O’Malley et al., 2020; Sippel and Dolinga, 2023). This support is legitimized in particular by the “missions” that these technological developments would enable to fulfil, related to the “techno-scientific promise” of AgriTech, such as efficiency, productivity, environmental damage but also working conditions, cooperation or participation (Martin and Schnebelin, 2024). Both private and public organisations support the development of AgriTech, with discourses on “mission-oriented” support. Despite this evolution and the growing influence of private funding on the agricultural innovation system (Glenna et al., 2015), the AgriTech ecosystems, and their impact on the agricultural innovation system, remain poorly studied (Klerkx and Villalobos, 2024). It raises questions about what are the rationales of public and private support for AgriTech development, and how it does or does not promote the “missions” of environmental, economic and social improvement. It has not yet been well investigated whether public and private instruments support AgriTech in the same way or if they have specificities in terms of rationales for action. To address these research gaps, we present a comparative study of AgriTech innovation ecosystems in France and Chile. These two countries offer different settings in terms of institutional context, while both are very dynamic in terms of AgriTech development. In France, the development of the AgriTech sector and its start-ups has been a public policy objective for almost a decade, with discourses on the missions that this technological development will fulfill (Bournigal et al., 2015). Chile has been among the first countries in Latin America to have a dedicated public program for generic start-up support (StartUp Chile - Gonzalez-Uribe and Leatherbee, 2018). More recently, it has been identified as a favourable and attractive area for the development of agricultural technologies (Radiografía Agtech -Endeavor, 2022), and an ecosystem of innovation focused on AgriTech is emerging, driven by public support for innovation and the regrouping of sectoral companies, such as the creation, of AgroTech Chile. Through an analysis of the CrunchBase database we describe the landscape of AgriTech funding. This is complemented with analysis of interviews with key public and private stakeholders of AgriTech innovation ecosystems, to describe the rationale of AgriTech support instruments and who and what they support, through their perceived benefits or their assessment (Kerr et al., 2017). We characterize these instruments according to the organisations providing the support, its objectives, the organisations that can benefit from the support, the type of resources it provides or facilitates access to, and the stage of intervention (Audretsch et al., 2020). The results will allow us to discuss the articulation of private and public support for agricultural innovation, the evolution of agricultural innovation policies in a context of neoliberalism and of a regime of entrepreneurial innovation (« the Silicon Valley model of innovation »).