March 30, 2022

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

Agtech is booming. Last year saw a record $5 billion invested in the space across 440 funding deals, according to data from Crunchbase. This activity is creating intense momentum that is driving demand for new tools to help power applications that help farmers make more informed decisions in areas spanning farmland financing and carbon sequestration, to digital products that unlock new value channels. 

However, there are data infrastructure barriers in existence that are choking market opportunities for new agtech products and offering throughout the entire food and ag supply chains.

But there is help on the horizon. Food and agriculture data infrastructure company Leaf Agriculture (Leaf) has secured $5 million in Seed funding led by S2G Ventures with participation from all existing investors: Cutlivian, Radicle Growth, and SP Ventures. 

“Our investment in Leaf supports its continued growth and success in being a catalyst for agtech development overall,” said Cristina Rohr, managing director, S2G Ventures. “Farm data is only useful when it can be easily read and used. Leaf is rewriting the rules when it comes to building with farm data and we’re excited to support them.”

Leaf’s unified farm data API is being used by software developers and companies of all sizes to send and receive user-permissioned data across platforms in a consistent, standardized way, enabling companies to build more sophisticated applications years ahead of schedule. 

“We started Leaf after experiencing the frustrations of developers working in food and agriculture first hand,” said Bailey Stockdale, CEO and co-founder, Leaf. “Before Leaf, large and well-funded development teams would struggle for years to overcome inconsistent data access, formats, translation, organization, and integrations. Now these same companies and teams of all sizes use Leaf to focus on building new value for their customers instead of maintaining redundant backend infrastructure.”Farming and food are among the largest, but least digitized, industries in the world. But by removing data infrastructure barriers, Leaf is enabling agtech companies, ranging from solo founders to worldwide leaders, to focus on more rapidly launching their core products and scaling faster.

Companies representing more than 200 million acres are already using Leaf’s API to build and scale products for carbon and sustainability tracking, farm management, lending and insurance, biotech, land and input marketplaces, agronomy, food traceability, maintenance forecasting, and more.

Leaf plans to use this capital to globally grow its commercial, customer success, and development teams, to generate support for new data types, and to launch new services like Field Operations (a platform that allows developers to work with full Field Operation datasets increase of fragmented machine data files) to further empower software developers to solve some of the world’s greatest health, economic, and environmental challenges. 

“We are pleased to see Leaf overachieve its milestones which triggered this financing ahead of plan,” said Kirk Haney, managing partner, Radicle Growth. “This is a testament to the leadership team and the demand for digital infrastructure in agriculture and food. Leaf is making the use of data on the farm a reality, and we are extremely pleased to add S2G Ventures to the company.”

– Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com. 

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