AI-based agronomic advisory platform FarmQA has closed a $4 million seed round led by VC firm gener8tor’s North Dakota arm, gener8tor 1889.
“Significant participation” came from Kevin O’Leary’s VC firm via the Wonder Fund North Dakota as well as regional fund Badlands Capital.
The new funding will go towards expansion of the FarmQA platform, including new AI tools and capabilities, says CEO Kris Poulson.
Poulson, who joined FarmQA last year, is best known as a cofounder of Sentera, the aerial imaging company acquired this month by John Deere. [Disclosure: AgFunderNews parent company AgFunder was an investor in Sentera.]
Under his leaderhsip, FarmQA reportedly After ????? doubled recurring revenue and significantly expanded its acres under management from 20 million to 37 million.
Of course there’s no shortage of digital agronomy tools these days. For Poulson, there are two things that make FarmQA stand out from the pack: “The cleanest data and a lot of acres under management,” he says.
Its agronomic advisory platform digitizes tasks such as field scouting, soil sampling, fertility planning, and prescription writing. All of these tasks produce data, and agricultural data tends to be very messy, with information coming from various pieces of equipment and entered by various people.
FarmQA’s customers, most of whom are independent crop consultants, are different, says Poulson.
“We work with some of the best crop consultants out there, and they work with ‘cream-of-the-crop’ growers that are actively wanting to manage more acreage intensely and willing to spend money trying new things. We’re working with these growers’ trusted advisors.”
Because of these high-profile, early adopter customers, the data FarmQA has for its 37 million acres is “super clean.”
“To make these large language models in AI go, you need clean data and a lot of it. We have both,” he says.
Supercharging agronomists with AI
None of that means FarmQA plans to displace actual agronomists, however.
In fact, Poulson says far from replacing the agronomist, FarmQA is “trying to really embolden them to do bigger and better things.”
He likens FarmQA’s AI-driven platform to the medical field: “[Doctors] use AI to help with note taking and other tasks, but what they’re doing is augmenting their ability to do a better job and be more efficient with their time. That’s how AI will assist our customers too. Agronomists and CCAs [certified crop advisors] are like a doctor to plants.”
In practical terms, bringing more AI to agronomists could mean, for example, having the platform comb through notes to find every recommendation ever made for a particular acre of soybeans.
“A low-value task [for an advisor] would be to read through that data line by line,” says Poulson. “We help streamline that, so that the advisor can focus on, say, a disease in that field and researching what to do for it. Or spending more time in the field or time with the grower.”
‘We have a war chest we could do interesting things with’
The seed round was oversubscribed—a rarity in the current agtech fundraising environment, which is, to put it lightly, still undergoing a massive correction.
Poulson has a simple explanation for why FarmQA and a handful of successfully raise while so many others struggle right now: “The companies actually doing meaningful work will survive.”
In the end, he adds, there was “no shortage of companies” wanting to back FarmQA.
To date, FarmQA has been “a very bootstrapped organization,” and part of the new capital will go towards bolstering marketing and sales to help grow the company, he adds.
The company, which scooped up competitor Farm Dog last year, will also do more acquisitions in 2025 and 2026 thanks to “additional capital.”
“We have a war chest here we could go out and do some interesting things with.”
At least one lesson he’ll take from his Sentera days and apply to Farm QA is the pace of growth.
“We grew too quickly [at Sentera] and we had to lay people off. I know that in the course of my career, I’ll probably have to do it again, but I’m going to try and minimize that, which means making sure we’re growing FarmQA in a very fiscally responsible way.”
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