D.C. and New York–based farm management platform
AgSquared is expanding. The news comes after the close of a $1.2m seed round at the beginning of the year.
"We're using the funds to expand and support the development of our software to date," says Giulia Stellari, co-CEO and cofounder of the company. She describes the funding as a "rolling seed round" and says that the first closing is complete.
AgSquared provides integrated cloud-based business management tools for farmers. The system allows small farms to plan fields and crops; keep records; track supplies, harvests and labor; and analyze costs to make better decisions and become more sustainable. Currently, more than 7,200 farms—most of them small family operations—use the platform to manage their operations, in more than 80 different countries.
"Vegetable production is very labor intensive," Stellari explains. "Labor can be one of the biggest expenses [for a farm]." But labor can be hard to quantify and to factor into the actual cost of production. For example, harvesting cabbage takes no time, but weeding onions is very labor intensive. Without AgSquared, "diversity [of crops] can obscure which crops are moneymakers and which are not. [AgSquared] makes it so diversity is a benefit to the business."
In November 2013, AgSquared made
headlines by acquiring
Local Dirt, an online marketplace for buying and selling produce locally. "Local Dirt has an amazing suite of sales management tools on the back end," Stellari says.
With the acquisition of Local Dirt, Stellari and cofounder Jeff Froikin-Gordon, with the rest of their team of 11, are working on "taking crop production management from seed to harvest to sale."
A mobile app, set to launch in spring or summer, is also in the works.