New York, N.Y. July 31, 2024 – Leaf, the unified farm data API and largest farm data processing platform, announced today the close of a $11.3 million Series A round, led by Spero Ventures. The funding round included participation from all existing investors. Andrew Parker has joined Leaf’s Board of Directors.
In 2023, United States farmers were collecting data on 72% of all available farmland. In 2013, this number was just 33%. Additionally, in 2023, 42% of farmers said that data had a major influence on their farm management decisions, up from just 10% in 2017. This increase in data collection and use has tremendously improved yields for the industry. However, it has also presented a new issue of data management and reconciliation.
Crop insurance, seed & chemical, biotech, AgTech, cooperatives, and other companies all use farm data to improve their existing services and offer new products. Before Leaf, these companies attempted to build massive data infrastructure to manage and reconcile all of the weather, irrigation, imagery, tractor, and other data they were collecting. Not only did this process require a substantial investment, it also took hundreds of hours of ongoing engineering resources and development time to build, operate, and maintain. The team at Leaf identified this issue and created a single unified API where companies can easily access all of their data and focus on building new value with the data instead of building and maintaining messy integrations and data translation infrastructure.
G. Bailey Stockdale, the co-founder & CEO of Leaf, created Leaf in response to feeling the pain of connecting agriculture data while attempting to build agronomy tools for his family’s farm. Inspired by tools like Stripe & Plaid in finance, Twilio in telecom, or Nylas in communications, Leaf built a product that allows farm and agriculture companies to focus on creating value for their customers whilst smartly managing their resources.
“We chose to work with Leaf because of the efficiency multiplier for processing precision agriculture data. Working with Leaf allows our internal resources to focus on our agents and producers while cost effectively allowing us to scale our precision agriculture usage. We are looking forward to expanding our capabilities through our partnership with Leaf,” said Tyler Aring, Assistant Vice President of Crop Technology at AgriSompo.
Spero Ventures, who led the Series A funding round, brings a wealth of B2B SaaS experience that complements Leaf’s agriculture expertise. Spero's commitment to mission driven founders and companies aligns with Leaf’s vision for technology’s role in agriculture.
"Leaf’s mission of using technology to improve the lives of everyone involved in the farm and agriculture business resonated deeply with our mission. As lead investors, we see Leaf as a driving force in agricultural technology, enabling agricultural service providers to deliver value to farmers on a broader scale. We're thrilled to be part of this journey and bring our B2B SaaS experience to support Leaf’s growth," said Andrew Parker, General Partner at Spero Ventures.
The Leaf team expects to use these funds to expand their suite of product offerings and partnerships. The team is also committed to refining their API and investing in operations to support growth of their product and team. For more information about Leaf, please visit withleaf.io.
About Leaf
Founded in 2018, Leaf provides food and agricultural companies and their software teams with unprecedented access to user-permissioned data from a wide variety of sources which saves time and resources and helps these companies deliver farm data related products without the hassle of creating a plethora of different API connections or working with many different file types. Today, companies collectively managing over 1 billion acres, choose Leaf to manage their data infrastructure so they can focus on servicing their customers, bringing new products to market, controlling their cloud spend, and building the future of the food & agriculture business. For more information about Leaf, please visit withleaf.io.
About Spero Ventures
Spero Ventures is an early-stage venture capital investor in the things that make life worth living. We invest in determined founders building mission-driven technology companies in three focus areas: wellbeing; sustainability; learning, work, and play. We are high-conviction investors with backgrounds as startup founders, operators, and investors from landmark companies including eBay and Tesla. For more information, please visit us at spero.vc, on Twitter @SperoVentures or on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/speroventures.
Media Contact
Ilyas Frenkel
ilyas@withleaf.io
