agtech
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AgriNovus Indiana puts farm innovation on a longer clock
Seven-week contests gave young companies too little time. AgriNovus Indiana built a longer accelerator, linking farm problems, food science and the people who might turn an experiment into a business.
Barchart Put Futures on the Web. Then Its Readers Asked to Borrow the Plumbing
A 1995 subscription site became a data supplier when customers asked to put its quotes on their own pages. Thirty years later, Barchart serves both the person checking a soybean chart and the grain elevator managing the hedge behind it.
DTN Is the $900 Million Data Company Hiding in Plain Sight
Before a farmer sprays, a fuel truck loads, a utility deploys a crew or a golf tournament clears the course, someone has to make a call. DTN sells the evidence behind that call.
The 70-Day Hardware Sprint: Motivo Built a Company for the Projects Everyone Else Calls Impossible
Motivo puts mechanical engineers, coders and fabricators under one roof, then hands them the sort of brief that makes a normal vendor ask for another quarter. Its real product is not a robot, tractor or aircraft part - it is a faster way to make hard technology real.
Rob Hranac Is Taking the Long Way Down to Scale Climate Tech
After years spent making roads legible, GPS precise and soil measurable, Rob Hranac has arrived at Loam Bio with a practical brief: turn microscopic fungi into something farmers can trust at field scale.
James Ethington Is Making Farm Data Earn Its Keep
After helping turn Climate FieldView into a tool used across 50 million paid acres, the Arable CEO is chasing a harder prize: field intelligence simple enough to trust when water, yield, and livelihoods are on the line.
Irving Rivera Is Teaching Agriculture to Read the Soil's Hidden Signals
The Solena co-founder began with a student biofertilizer project. A decade later, he is turning billions of DNA sequences into decisions farmers can use.
Robert Chen Has Spent 45 Years Teaching Machines to Pay Attention. Now They’re Watching Plants.
The AEssenseGrows founder built his career around sensors, software and machines that notice what people cannot. His latest bet puts that same discipline to work in the root zone.
Iftach Birger Is Teaching Farms to See the Work
Raised in a farming family and trained as a plant scientist, Fieldin’s co-founder spent a decade turning tractors, sprayers and field crews into readable operations. Now, as CEO, he is betting that useful farm AI begins with earning the grower’s trust.
Eitan Marder-Eppstein Put Warehouse Robots on Salad Duty
The roboticist who once taught machines to navigate offices is now giving them watering cans - and asking whether a greenhouse can compete with a field on price.
Liane Hart Is Teaching a Phone to Read the Breeding Barn
A Purdue geneticist, horse breeder and former animal-industry marketer saw an overlooked laboratory tool and asked a farm question. Her answer became Verility - a four-person Indiana company trying to put fertility intelligence in a producer's hand.
Hannah Freeman Put HR Software in the Strawberry Field
After 14 years listening to growers and farmworkers, Hannah Freeman saw a workplace-software market hiding in plain sight. Ganaz is her attempt to make the business of feeding people work better for the people doing it.
Remo Carbone Is Turning a Butcher’s Eye Into Data
The MEQ Solutions co-founder spent years teaching cameras and probes to read red meat. Now his company is trying to make objective measurement the common language of a global supply chain.
Brandon Contino Taught a Robot to Pick the Produce Aisle
He started with neural prosthetics, followed a water problem into agriculture, and discovered that the hardest part of a tomato is persuading a machine to pick it quickly, gently and all day long.
Chris Tolles Is Building a Tape Measure for the Dirt
The furniture designer turned climate founder is betting that better soil data can make carbon claims more credible - and regenerative agriculture more useful to the people who actually work the land.
George Lobisser Put Blueberries on Pause
After selling a postharvest chemistry business, George Lobisser made a contrarian bet on pressure, patience and very little air. His second act at RipeLocker is a lesson in designing for the stubborn realities of fruit.
Nick Iwig Is Moving Seed Treatment to the Last Responsible Moment
After a career that ran from a Wisconsin malt house to soybean strategy and seed-treatment sales, the Iowa founder is betting that one of farming’s oldest decisions should happen seconds before the seed meets soil.
Moody Soliman Put a Climate Strategy on a Fruit Sticker
The Ryp Labs co-founder spent years learning that the crucial part of deep tech is often where you put it. His answer to produce waste fits inside a clamshell lid.
Len Kahn Keeps Finding the Next Move
After building, selling and rebuilding agricultural marketing firms, Len Kahn has taken his farm-bred instincts into agtech. His career is a case study in staying close to the customer, saying the useful thing out loud and always keeping one move in reserve.
BinSentry Put a Fuel Gauge on the World’s Feed Bins - Then Walked Away From Farmers
A farmer asked a question that sounded like a quick Google search: how much feed is left in the bin? Nine years, tens of thousands of sensors and roughly $100 million in disclosed capital later, BinSentry has turned the answer into an enterprise logistics business.
Ryp Labs Built a Sticker That Can Double Fruit's Shelf Life - Then Learned Where Waste Actually Hurts
A Malaysian fruit-stall problem became a Seattle biotech company, an $8.1 million round, and a lesson most deep-tech founders learn late: the best market is not always the biggest one - it is the one already paying for the pain.
The Pig-Breeding Startup That Found Its Real Product in the ‘Holy Grail’ of Fertility
Verility began by putting semen analysis on a phone. Then a 400-sow field study pointed it toward a harder, more lucrative question: not whether to breed, but exactly when.
The Startup That Put a Number on Your Steak
For a century, beef and lamb have been graded by a person squinting at a carcass. MEQ Solutions built the hardware and AI to give the industry a number it can trust - and got the USDA to sign off.
The Startup Dragging Farm Payroll Out of the 1980s
Farm HR still runs on paper packets and cash-back-of-the-check math. Ganaz built a phone-first onboarding, messaging and payroll stack for the 175,000+ workers who feed the rest of us.
The Startup That Sucks the Air Out of Blueberries - and Buys Them Twelve Extra Weeks
A tenth of an atmosphere is all it takes. RipeLocker's vacuum chambers keep blueberries market-fresh for three months - and want to move the world's fruit by boat instead of plane.
The Dirt Is Cheap. Proving It Is Not: Yard Stick's Bet on Better Soil Carbon Data
Soil can store carbon, but the proof has been slow, costly and easy to distrust. Yard Stick is building the measurement layer that tells carbon-project developers and food companies whether the dirt is actually doing what the spreadsheet promised.
The Robot That Picks a Tomato Better Than You Can
Two Pitt engineers spent months living in greenhouses to learn why picking a tomato is so hard for a machine. Their answer, the GR-100, now harvests faster than the humans it works alongside.
The Tiny Iowa Company Putting Seed Treatment on the Planter - One Zone at a Time
POP-ST moves a century-old farm input decision from the seed plant to the planter. With patents, field trials, and partners ranging from ALMACO to TeeJet, Inflexion Point Technologies is trying to make every treatment earn its place in the row.
The Farm App Rejected at the Gate - Then Trusted With 22 Million Animals
AgriWebb turned the stockman's pocket notebook into an offline-first operating system for cattle and sheep. Its first hoped-for buyer almost walked away - and taught the founders why farm software wins on trust before data.
Daniel McCann Is Teaching Farm Machinery to See Every Plant
A houseplant taught his computer vision system to recognize green. A Saskatchewan upbringing supplied the larger question: could machines make a decision for every plant in a field?