Cooks Venture picks up $12 million to rethink agriculture from the ground up

“You are what what you’re eating eats,” says Matthew Wadiak, cofounder and CEO of Cooks Venture and former Blue Apron COO.

The company, which just received $12 million in funding, is looking to rethink the way we grow crops, feed our livestock, and ultimately take better care of our planet. The strategy is three-fold.

First, Cooks Venture partners with small farms to set up regenerative agricultural practices from its own IP, which it has also set up at its own 800-acre farm. This includes determining which types of plants will protect the soil itself and sequester carbon in the ground. It also includes measuring soil carbon, nutrition and other biological factors to promote biodiversity and stave off pest populations. According to the company, leading climate scientists believe that if this process was carried out for all farms across the globe, climate change could be reversed.

But regenerative agriculture as a product is just a small slice of what Cooks Ventures is all about. After all, what is Cooks Venture actually growing on its farm? The answer is chicken feed. But not the same old chicken feed that’s been around for generations.

Cooks Venture chicken feed is grown specifically for Cooks Venture chickens, which have been selected over many, many generations of Heritage chickens to have the best digestive health, and are given unrestricted access to the outdoors. All in all, it took more than a decade to isolate the genetic lines that have resulted in Cooks Venture chickens, called Heirloom chickens. These chickens are also more heat resistant, meaning that they can be raised in unusually hot places once the company looks to expand globally.

Because these chickens are able to eat a more diverse diet, with more fiber and protein than the chicken feed used on other chicken farms, they are higher in omegas, healthier and taste better, according to Wadiak. Moreover, Cooks Venture has managed to scale up its operations, including its own processing facility, to distribute upwards of 700,000 chickens per week.

Obviously, Cooks Venture’s main revenue model is selling chickens. The company is currently working with FreshDirect, Golden Gate Meat Company, and has more retail partnerships to announce soon, alongside sales of the chickens on its website.

But the funding will also go towards building out the upstream and downstream revenue models. Upstream, Cooks Venture wants to partner with farmers to not only build out regenerative agricultural practices, but to show them that they can actually grow more calories per acre (and thus make more money) by using these regenerative processes. The IP around how to do this — which crops to grow, which trees and ponds to leave in place, and how to rotate those crops — is a valuable product.

Downstream, the company wants to work with chicken farmers or companies who are interested in proliferating the Cooks Ventures genetic lines throughout the world.

In this way, Cooks Venture is the first vertically integrated agricultural company to operate solely on regenerative agriculture.

Wadiak says the greatest challenge to Cooks Venture is educating people around regenerative agtech and mobilizing those people to move the needle against old-school, economically unsound and environmentally unfriendly agricultural systems.

“97 percent of agriculture in America is crops and most of those crops are going to animal feed,” said Wadiak. “Unless we address the animal feed system in our country and the lobbying and political misrepresentation in those systems, it’s very challenging to change the food system and create regenerative systems.”

He added that America’s farmers make up two percent of the voting population, whereas billions of dollars are spent lobbying congressman to vote for proliferating subsidies in corn and soy.

The $12 million in financing was provided by AMERRA Capital Management.

Source. TechCrunch, Jordan Crook, September 5, 2019

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Bringing tech efficiencies to the agribusiness market, Silo harvests $3 million

By Johnathan Shieber

Roughly $165 billion worth of wholesale produce is bought and sold every year in the U.S. And while that number is expected to go up to $1 trillion by 2025, the business of agribusiness remains unaffected by technology advancements that have reshaped almost every other industry.

Now Silo, a company that recently raised $3 million from investors led by Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian’s Initialized Capital and including Semil Shah from Haystack Ventures, angel investors Kevin Mahaffey and Matt Brezina and The Penny Newman Grain Company, an international grain and feed marketplace, is looking to change that.

Silo’s chief executive, Ashton Braun, spent years working in commodities marketplaces as a coffee trader in Singapore and moved to California after business school. As part of the founding team at Kite with Adam Smith, Braun worked on getting off the ground Kite’s software to automate computer programming, but he’d never let go of creating a tool that could help farmers and buyers better communicate and respond to demand signals, Braun says.

“I was a super young, green, bright-eyed potential entrepreneur,” says Braun. Eventually, Braun took the opportunity to develop the software that had been on his mind for four-and-a-half years.*

He’d seen the technology work in another industry closer to home. Growing up in Boston, Braun had seen how technology was used to update the fishing industry, giving ships a knowledge of potential buyers of their catch while they were still out in ocean waters.

“When you’re moving a product that’s worth tens of thousands of dollars and has a shelf life of a few days there’s literally no room for error and there’s a lot you need to do,” says Braun. It’s a principle that applies not only to seafood but to the hundreds of millions of dollars of produce and meat that comes from farms in places like California. “What we want to do is we want communication and data to live in the right places at the right time.”

Braun says there’s limited data coming in to farmers to let them know what demand for certain produce looks like, so they’re making guesses that have real financial outcomes with very little data.

Silo’s software vets and supports buyers and suppliers to give farmers a window into demand and potential buyers a view into available supply and quality.

“What Silo is building has the potential to make marketing and distribution of agriculture incredibly more efficient, which is a win both for the suppliers and buyers. We’re excited to support and assist this team as they work to move agriculture forward,” said Eric Woersching, general partner at Initialized Capital, in a statement.

Silo is using the new financing to make a hiring push and develop new products and services to support liquidity in its perishable goods marketplace.

While an earlier generation of agribusiness software focused on increasing productivity on farms, a new crop of companies is targeting the business of farming itself. Companies like AgriChain and GrainChain also offer supply chain management software for farming, and WorldCover is creating insurance products for small farmowners in emerging markets.

The penetration of technology through near ubiquitous mobile devices, coupled with sensing technologies and machine learning-enhanced predictive software, is transforming one of the world’s oldest industries.

“I’ve come across quite a few marketplace platforms attempting to serve different segments of the agriculture supply chain, and none of which have come close to impressing me to the degree Silo has in their tech-forward approach to reducing the friction that comes with managing all aspects of the supply chain on their platform. Silo’s deployment of machine learning streamlines the process, requiring little to no change in their users’ workflow, and removes many barriers of their platform reaching critical mass,” said Matthew Nicoletti, commodity trader at The Penny Newman Grain Company.

*An earlier version of this story referenced Kite’s sale to

Microsoft. The company remains independent.

Source. TechCrunch, Johnathan Shieber, May 21, 2019

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Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

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AgroStar gets $27M Series C to give more Indian farmers increased crop production with data analytics

By Catherine Shu

Indian agriculture tech startup AgroStar announced today that it has raised a $27 million Series C for its platform, which helps farmers increase crop production, manage orders and buy supplies online. The round was led by Bertelsmann India Investments, with participation from returning investors Accel, Chiratae Ventures and Aavishkaar Bharat Fund.

AgroStar bills its app as a “one-stop solution” that contains everything India’s 135 million farmers need, including agronomy tools, such as a crop disease diagnosis tool that combines image recognition technology, educational content and an e-commerce store that sells farming products. Its new funding, which brings AgroStar’s total raised so far to $42 million, will be used to scale the platform in order to take advantage of India’s increasing smartphone penetration in rural areas and hire more agriculture experts.

CEO and co-founder Shardul Sheth told TechCrunch that the app has been downloaded more than a million times and engaged with by more than a million farmers. Its target is to reach 10 million downloads over the next two years and expand its e-commerce operations to more states in India.

In a statement, Bertelsmann India Investments managing director Pankaj Makkar said the investment firm will work with AgroStar to “build the right strategy for its supply chain and will bring the best practices from our investments in similar spaces in China.”

Source. Techcrunch, Catherine Shu,  March 13, 2019