Leaf Agriculture simplifies farm data access for agtech enterprises

Los Angeles-based Leaf Agriculture, a startup providing farm data infrastructure to agtech enterprises, today announced it has raised $5 million in seed funding. 

Food and agriculture are the largest industries in the world, but when it comes to digitization, they continue to remain underserved. Some startups do offer digital products to help farmers and other stakeholders make more informed decisions, although a large chunk of the market remains uncaptured, leaving significant room for new agtech offerings that could unlock value for farmers, food processors, retailers and consumers.

Where does Leaf Agriculture come in?

To help enterprises make the most of this opportunity, Leaf Agriculture offers a unified farm data API that allows anyone to send and receive user-permissioned data across platforms in a consistent, standardized way, eliminating the need to build and maintain multiple data integrations and related backend infrastructure for data access, translation, organization and other elements required to building digital applications. 

This way, the solution allows companies of all sizes to build more sophisticated applications ahead of schedule and focus their time and resources on their core products, go-to-market and scaling strategy.

“Some of the leading agtech companies are using Leaf to eliminate redundant, complex, and expensive-to-maintain backend code,” Bailey Stockdale, co-founder and CEO of Leaf Agriculture, told Venturebeat. 

“Leaf makes sophisticated agtech products to build and scale, similar to the way that cloud computing made building SaaS products accessible for anyone to build. Enterprises should care about this because now they have access to the tools they need to build and ship the products that were previously difficult to build in a realistic time frame,” he added.

Growth

In the last 12 months, the company has roped in more than 35 enterprise customers that collectively represent over 200 million acres of land. This includes seed and chemical companies, organizations using farm data to track carbon/sustainability, biotech companies, agriculture retailers/cooperatives, financial institutions, agronomists and agtech startups.

While Leaf doesn’t have any direct rivals in the farm data infrastructure market, Stockdale said, he did note that some companies have developed certain similar products. “We have competitors who offer machine data file translation services like us, but currently Leaf is the only one solving for the larger data infrastructure challenges facing the food and ag industry,” he said.

Funding

With this round of funding, which was led by S2G Ventures, the company plans to grow its sales, operations, customer success and development teams globally, add support for new data types and launch new services like field operations to further realize their vision of empowering software developers. 

“The funding will also help us launch new products including tools to help developers build with consistent soil data, weather data, irrigation data, and seed and chemical names. We are also exploring building higher level products on top of our existing products for fintech, carbon, and agronomy that help developers in those agtech verticals build, ship, and scale even faster,” the CEO said.

According to Markets and Markets, the global agriculture analytics market is expected to grow from $0.8 billion in 2020 to $1.4 billion by 2025, with a CAGR of over 12%.