Leaf Agriculture, a farm data management platform, has successfully raised $11.3 million in Series A financing. The funding round was led by Spero Ventures and saw participation from all existing investors. The fresh capital will be directed towards expanding Leaf’s product offerings, forging new partnerships, and scaling up its team.
In recent years, the agricultural sector has witnessed a significant uptick in data collection on farms. According to Leaf cofounder and CEO G. Bailey Stockdale, around 72% of farms are now engaged in data collection, a substantial increase from just 33% in 2013. While this surge in data collection has generated considerable value, it has also introduced a myriad of challenges, including incompatible file formats and broken integrations.
“APIs are brittle and change often in all industries. Agriculture is no exception,” noted Andrew Parker, Spero general partner, in a recent blog post. “As farm equipment manufacturers improve their APIs with each new version and model release, those changes will break your services if you don’t have a clean layer of abstraction that can handle these changes as they emerge. Leaf handles this better than any single development team can do on their own.”
Leaf’s farm data API and platform aim to simplify data management for companies operating in sectors like crop insurance, seed and chemical, biotech, and more. The platform connects with data providers such as John Deere, Climate Fieldview, CNHi, AgLeader, Planet Labs, and Valley Irrigation. It translates their proprietary files into a consistent format, cleans the data, associates it with field boundaries, and makes it available for further processing.
Rather than working directly with farmers, Leaf is designed for companies that support the food and agriculture system. The platform pulls in data from third-party APIs or uploaded data to translate, format, and clean it, making it available for use in one single integration. Spero Ventures describes this “API-as-a-Service” product as a “lingua franca” for the common mess of proprietary data formats and competing standards that often leave user data inert in silos.
“The cost of using Leaf pays for itself in both lower initial development costs and reduced maintenance costs,” Parker added.
One practical application of Leaf’s technology is in crop insurance. Companies can offer insurance for only the planted area of a field instead of the government-defined property tax boundary, potentially providing discounts for farmers enrolled in precision ag programs. “Crop insurance companies use Leaf to precisely determine the planted area from the data generated by the machines operating on the field,” Stockdale explained. “This is an extremely high-quality source of data, and Leaf helps bring data from any tractor to a single, consistent format, allowing insurance companies to deploy their precision programs on any farm.”
Leaf’s platform is also valuable in biotech and regenerative agriculture. Companies in these sectors need to verify that specific activities occurred during a season to certify that the resulting crop qualifies for regenerative ag subsidies or premium pricing. “These companies use field boundaries, machine data, and satellite imagery from Leaf to validate that their program’s management practices were followed,” Stockdale said.
The Series A funding will enable Leaf to build out its go-to-market team and extend its platform to more companies. Stockdale mentioned that the company is also investing in new products. “Our upcoming products will offer new ways for companies to use Leaf, including running end-to-end workflows on Leaf without needing to do any additional data processing on their side.” Additionally, Leaf plans to release new data cleaning and quality tools to help companies package their data for analytics, AI models, and more.
This latest funding round marks a significant milestone for Leaf Agriculture, positioning the company to further solidify its role as a key player in the agricultural data management space.