Climate-focused deep tech startup HabiTerre has announced the initial close of $10 million in its Series A funding round, with agricultural giant John Deere leading the investment. John Deere’s involvement is particularly noteworthy, as the company had previously invested in HabiTerre’s 2022 seed round. This latest financial boost will enable HabiTerre to scale up its environmental systems models, which analyze the impact of farming techniques on crop productivity and the environment. The company is also actively seeking an additional $3 million to $4 million to complete the Series A round.
HabiTerre’s CEO, Nick Reinke, views John Deere’s continued investment as a powerful endorsement of the technology’s potential. “We’ve executed a number of pilots and are working with various commercial customers,” Reinke said. “We’re really getting clear on what the market needs from technology like ours. This market around environmental outcomes in ag is real, but it’s struggling to realize its potential because of the inefficiencies with data. There’s also a general lack of confidence in the outcomes generated, so that scientific rigor is a really key piece.”
The startup’s technology, which has been built upon extensive research by University of Illinois professor Dr. Kaiyu Guan, employs a “system-of-systems” approach. This technology integrates remote sensing, process models, and artificial intelligence to monitor and measure the environmental impacts of farm operations. It can evaluate past, present, and future land performance and create simulations to predict environmental outcomes. The applications of this technology extend beyond croplands to include grasslands, forests, and wetlands.
Dr. Guan, who won the FoodShot Global Groundbreaker prize in 2022, emphasized the broader ambitions of HabiTerre. “We have the ambition to become a global standard to quantify agricultural decarbonization and sustainability metrics,” he stated. “We are building upon an already strong history, but there is much more work yet to be done, and HabiTerre is excited to dig in and be the industry leader.”
The validation of HabiTerre’s model by the carbon accounting nonprofit Climate Action Reserve further underscores the technology’s credibility. Reinke noted that there is overwhelming demand for technologies that can serve as the back-end infrastructure to make carbon markets work at scale. This demand is a significant driver for the Series A fundraise, aimed at keeping up with market needs.
While HabiTerre’s primary focus is currently on agriculture, Reinke clarified that the company’s vision extends beyond agtech. “We’re really climate tech software, and we’re not trying to build a business that’s based upon us being a new farmer-facing platform and that being the end-all-be-all for us. It’s really about scalable technological infrastructure for climate impact,” he explained. “Agriculture just happens to be the place that we see the best application of our technology.”
Beyond measuring greenhouse gas emissions, HabiTerre’s platform looks holistically at agricultural production systems. This includes applications in water-use efficiency, clean water impact, fertilizer-use metrics, and nitrous oxide emissions. “We feel pretty good about what we’re doing because there are just a lot of different ways that we can apply our technology. This [in agriculture] just happens to be the place where it is most impactful right now,” Reinke added.
In the current fundraising environment, where capital is less freely available, the climate tech sector has shown resilience. This has been beneficial for HabiTerre, which is now looking to secure the remaining $3 million to $4 million in its Series A round. “We’ve got a little bit of room left in the round and are just looking for strongly aligned investors,” Reinke concluded.