He grew up on a farm near Casselton, sold his last company to John Deere, and now runs the agronomy platform mapping 37 million acres - from a small town most software CEOs could not find on a map.
Four numbers that explain why a Fargo company keeps showing up in agtech headlines.
Most software CEOs treat fieldwork as a metaphor. Kris Poulson treats it as Tuesday.
The platform he runs, FarmQA, is the kind of company that prints quietly in trade press but rarely gets the breathless coverage reserved for chatbots. Yet in the year since Poulson took the CEO seat in May 2024, recurring revenue doubled and acres under management jumped from 20 million to 37 million. The company closed an oversubscribed $4 million seed round in June 2025, led by gener8tor 1889, with Kevin O'Leary's Wonder Fund North Dakota and Badlands Capital piling on.
This is his second act. His first was Sentera, an aerial imaging and analytics company he co-founded that grew 1800% under his watch and reached customers in more than fifty countries. John Deere bought it in May 2025. Lesser operators would have taken the exit, the keynote circuit, and the comfortable advisor's chair. Poulson went home to North Dakota and signed up for a software company half the size of the one he had just sold.
The reason is in the company's pitch deck and also, more plainly, in his biography. FarmQA was founded by Howard Dahl, the long-time CEO of Amity Technology and a Fargo manufacturing fixture. Dahl spent decades building things that move dirt. He needed someone who knew dirt and could ship software. Casselton's most credentialed export, with degrees in agricultural economics from NDSU and strategy from Harvard, plus a Licensed Crop Insurance Agent card and a Custom Applicators License in his wallet, fit the brief.
Poulson is candid about the industry's blind spot. "Lots of agtech is designed around companies, not producers," he has said - a sentence that doubles as a thesis statement and a quiet jab at most of his competitors. He has put the principle to work in product. Before FarmQA released its grower-facing QA Farmer app, he and his team interviewed more than fifty farmers and worked inside fifteen farm families through early access. The design rules that came back were unsentimental: big buttons, no bloat, actionable answers. The tractor cab is not a UX lab; it is bumpy.
The pitch to investors and customers leans on a phrase Poulson uses often: clean data. FarmQA's earliest, stickiest customers are independent crop consultants and premium growers who do the unglamorous work of recording every scouting note, soil sample, and prescription. Multiply that diligence by 37 million acres and a model has something to chew on. "Our ability to build an AI engine would be second to none given the cleanness of the data," he told reporters during the seed round.
He is also realistic about what AI should do for agronomy. The analogy he reaches for is medicine. AI helps doctors find the right answer faster; it does not replace the bedside conversation. FarmQA wants to compress an advisor's drudgery - the synthesis, the report-writing, the lookup - so the human can focus on the disease in the field. "Trying to really embolden them to do bigger and better things" is how he puts it.
For all that, the strategic conversation around FarmQA is unmistakably about scale. The company already absorbed Farm Dog last year. Poulson talks about acquisitions for 2025-2026 and grins when he says, "We have a war chest here we could go out and do some interesting things with." Translation: more deals are coming, and an international expansion that mirrors the playbook he ran at Sentera.
Sentera was Poulson's training run. The Minneapolis-based company turned aerial imagery and sensor data into in-season insights for growers. Under his commercial leadership, revenue grew 1800% and the customer footprint stretched across more than fifty countries. In May 2025, John Deere acquired the company - a tidy outcome for a co-founder and a credential that, in agtech, opens any door in any state with a soybean lobby.
What he carried over to FarmQA was not the technology. It was the scar tissue. "Sustainable, fiscally responsible growth," is how he describes the FarmQA plan, in pointed contrast to the burn-and-pray cycles that took down a previous generation of agtech darlings.
"When the iPhone came out, people said, 'I already have a phone, calculator, and MP3 player. Why do I need this?' But putting it together in one place changed everything."
On the bundle thesis behind QA Farmer
"We talked with more than 50 farmers and worked closely with 15 farm families while building QA Farmer."
"We have a war chest here we could go out and do some interesting things with."
Poulson did not leave North Dakota for the exit. He runs a national platform from the same county where he grew up, near Casselton, population a number you do not need to know.
He has chaired the NDSU Ag Economics Advisory Board since 2017 and sits on the Center for Digital Agriculture's advisory board. The pipeline goes both ways.
Howard Dahl, the Amity Technology veteran and FarmQA founder, hand-picked Poulson. The board chair stayed; the CEO chair changed.
Crop insurance agent. Custom applicator. He can sell you a policy and spray your beans. There is a confidence that comes from knowing the regulations that govern the people you sell to.
Big buttons. No bloat. Actionable answers. It reads like a screen-printed sign in a workshop. It is, in fact, a product spec.
His iPhone analogy is not flattery for Apple. It is a defense of integration in a market crowded with point solutions. One app, less guesswork.
An oversubscribed seed during an agtech downturn is rare. Wonder Fund (Kevin O'Leary), gener8tor 1889, and Badlands Capital all wrote checks.