Samuel
Adeyemo

A bet that landscaping is a software problem.

Walk into a landscaping company and you will often find a multi-million-dollar operation running on a tape measure, a truck, and a stack of paper estimates. Samuel Adeyemo looked at that and saw the same thing he saw a decade earlier in solar: a giant, physical-world industry that nobody had bothered to build proper software for. So in 2024 he co-founded Duranta in Seattle, and in July 2025 he raised a $7 million seed round to go after it.

Duranta's pitch is deceptively simple. Its proprietary AI model, named AIdan, can automatically measure every detail of a property - the lawn, the beds, the hardscape, the boundaries - and turn that into an accurate, attractive proposal. Bolt on design tools, invoicing, payment processing, and a CRM, and a crew that used to spend a morning driving to a site to eyeball a quote can do it from a screen in minutes.

"We've seen customers eliminate time-consuming site visits and close major contracts using our product," Adeyemo says. The product is unglamorous on purpose. The margin it unlocks is not.

Adeyemo was born in Nairobi to a professor and a teacher, a household where the default setting was learning. He carried that to the University of Chicago, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in economics, then to Wall Street, where he spent the better part of seven years at JP Morgan and rose to Vice President in the Chief Investment Office - the team responsible for investing the bank's own balance sheet.

It was a good job. It was also not the bigger impact he kept talking about. He left for Stanford, picking up an MBA and a master's in engineering, and started spending time on something closer to home: getting electricity to places that did not have reliable power. Through Vituo Technologies he worked on small commercial solar systems in emerging markets.

The turning point was a solar project for a school in East Africa. The panels were the easy part. The design, the paperwork, the sales and permitting work around them - the industry calls it "soft cost" - was where everything bogged down. That frustration became the thesis for his next company.