Leaf Agriculture raises $11.3m Series A to build ‘the lingua franca’ of ag data

• Farm knowledge administration platform Leaf Agriculture has raised $11.3 million in Collection A financing.
• Spero Ventures led the spherical, which additionally included participation from “all present buyers.”
• Leaf will use the brand new funds to develop its product choices and partnerships in addition to develop its crew.

Misplaced in farm knowledge translation

Leaf’s farm knowledge API and platform goals to make knowledge administration simpler for corporations working in crop insurance coverage, seed and chemical, biotech, and different areas.

About 72% of farms now accumulate knowledge on their fields, up from simply 33% in 2013, says Leaf cofounder and CEO G. Bailey Stockdale.

“This speedy enhance has created a great deal of new worth, but it surely has additionally launched a whole bunch of incompatible file codecs, damaged integrations, and a big problem for anybody constructing with the information.”

“APIs are brittle and alter typically in all industries. Agriculture isn’t any exception,” Spero common associate Andrew Parker wrote in a recent blog post. “As farm tools producers enhance their APIs with every new model and mannequin launch, these modifications will break your providers in the event you don’t have a clear layer of abstraction that may deal with these modifications as they emerge. Leaf handles this higher than any single improvement crew can do on their very own.”

Leaf, says Stockdale, “helps corporations entry, handle, and use their consumer’s farm knowledge. Our unified API connects with knowledge suppliers like John Deere, Local weather Fieldview, CNHi, AgLeader, Planet Labs, Valley Irrigation, and many others., interprets their proprietary information right into a constant format, cleans the information, associates it with Area Boundaries, after which makes it out there for additional processing.”

A ‘lingua franca’ for farm knowledge

Somewhat than working instantly with farmers, Leaf is designed for corporations that assist the meals and agriculture system. Leaf pulls in knowledge from third-party APIs or uploaded knowledge to translate, format and clear it in addition to make it out there. The concept is to make corporations’ choices appropriate with all farms in a single single integration.

Spero — who has joined the board of Leaf — calls this “API-as-a-Service” a kind of product that’s “a lingua franca for the frequent mess of proprietary knowledge codecs and competing requirements that trigger consumer knowledge to remain inert in silos, because of the issue of wrangling them.

“The price of utilizing Leaf pays for itself in each decrease preliminary improvement prices and diminished upkeep prices,” he provides.

Crop insurance coverage corporations are one instance, explains Stockdale. These corporations can now supply insurance coverage for less than the planted space of a subject as a substitute of the government-defined property tax boundary, which may imply reductions for farmers enrolled in an insurance coverage firm’s precision ag program.

“Crop insurance coverage corporations use Leaf to exactly decide the planted space from the information generated by the machines working on the sphere,” says Stockdale. “That is a particularly prime quality supply of information, and Leaf helps convey knowledge from any tractor (a whole bunch of incompatible file codecs) to a single, constant format, permitting insurance coverage corporations to deploy their precision packages on any farm.”

He says one other instance is how Leaf works with biotech and regenerative agriculture, the place “corporations must show that particular actions occurred throughout a season (e.g., a farmer utilized kind of fertilizer, planted sure crops, yield of a subject was above or under a threshold, and many others.) with a purpose to certify that the ensuing crop qualifies for regenerative ag subsidies or a premium worth.

“These corporations use subject boundaries, machine knowledge, and satellite tv for pc imagery from Leaf to validate that their program’s administration practices had been adopted.”

The place the funding will go

Leaf raised a $5 million seed round in 2022 led by S2G Ventures with participation from Cultivian, Radicle Progress, SP Ventures, and others.

The Collection A funding will go in the direction of constructing out Leaf’s go-to-market crew and produce the platform to extra corporations. Stockdale says the corporate can also be investing in transport new merchandise.

“Our upcoming merchandise will supply new methods for corporations to make use of Leaf together with operating end-to-end workflows on Leaf while not having to do any extra knowledge processing on their aspect.”

He says Leaf will even launch new knowledge cleansing and high quality instruments that can “additional assist corporations utilizing Leaf to bundle their knowledge for analytics, AI fashions, and extra.”

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