Powering the Underlying Data Infrastructure for Food & Agriculture: Why We Invested in Leaf

Earlier this year, Cultivian Sandbox had the privilege of leading a $2M Seed investment in Leaf, with participation from SP Ventures and existing investor Radicle Growth. Leaf lowers the barriers to entry in food and agriculture technology by providing developer-friendly API infrastructure for farm data. Software developers use Leaf’s API to build and scale a wide range of products including farm management software, lending products, carbon removal marketplaces, outcome-based financing, land and input marketplaces, agronomic recommendations, food traceability applications, equipment maintenance forecasting, and more.

There are a lot of new technology tools on the farm, but they don’t often talk to each other

Farmers have continued to adapt and innovate along with technology trends impacting the agriculture industry. These days, it’s not uncommon for farmers to have multiple software products to help run their operations, in addition to increasingly sophisticated machinery. While the increase in the amount of farm data has helped increase yield, minimize inputs, and make better informed decisions, there’s currently a limit on how efficiently you can analyze key data points that drive those results.

This is mainly due to the fact that agriculture data is typically stored in a variety of different proprietary formats. In order to access this data, an integration must be created that knows where the data is stored, and how to translate it. For every agtech company and data type, this must initially be done from scratch. This means that if a company created a valuable agronomic recommendation using three types of data from three providers, they could only ship it to farmers using all three specific data providers, dramatically reducing the potential market and overall value of the recommendation.

The power of APIs

Leaf’s long-term vision is to create a standardized network of agriculture data so companies can easily access data, create valuable tools, and deploy them at scale. While agtech companies can build their own individual APIs with select partners (and many have already successfully done this), the ability to plug into the entire ecosystem beyond key partners is expensive and time consuming if data integrations aren’t the sole focus of their product roadmap. Beyond the initial integration, maintenance of the integration as software goes through frequent updates can be a challenge and drain on developer bandwidth. We discovered that many companies prefer to outsource these data integrations to companies such as Leaf, who specialize and focus on this. A few examples of customer-specific use cases include:

• Agriculture cooperatives can build their own farm data dashboards using Leaf to send/receive field boundaries, satellite imagery, grower machine data, and member machine data.
• AgTech companies can use Leaf as their preferred API provider to transfer machine data and automatically export variable rate recommendations to potential partners.
• Seed and Chemical companies can improve the scalability of outcome-based pricing programs by using Leaf to integrate with machine, satellite imagery, weather, and soil data providers.

When analyzing the impact that Leaf could have on the agriculture industry, it was important to recognize the role that APIs already play in other industries. Stripe (payments), Plaid (banking), Twilio (messaging), Segment (marketing), SendGrid (email), Box (storage), Shippo (e-commerce logistics), Alloy (fraud protection), HumanAPI (healthcare), and countless other APIs have built essential infrastructure that enables industries to easily scale. The value of the broader API economy is estimated to be a multi-trillion dollar market.

Product-centric, developers first approach

Leaf’s API is powered by an extremely talented, hardworking, and ambitious team that’s laser focused on enabling developers to bring change to the broader food system. Bailey Stockdale, Leaf’s CEO & Co-Founder, spent eight years in Brazil’s agtech community building relationships and through this process, realized how much of a pain point data integrations were for local startups. Digging into the problem more, Bailey recognized that this pain point extended beyond geographic borders.

Never losing sight of Leaf’s core customer base (agtech developers), Bailey has built a culture focused on delivering self-service products that are quick and easy to use. Luiz Santana, Leaf’s CTO & Co-Founder, has done an amazing job managing a team of developers based in Brazil that continues to grow at a rapid rate. Recent hires such as Brandon Mensing, Leaf’s Head of Product, bring valuable experience in designing and implementing product roadmap strategies that will allow Leaf to prioritize a growing list of diverse customer demands. Prior to joining Leaf, Brandon was a Senior Product Manager at Cruise Automation and Elastic.

The technical challenges ahead will require Leaf to innovate, adapt, and continue to hire the right talent. We recognize that Leaf is in a unique position to help the agriculture industry scale data-driven solutions and unlock the true potential of digital agriculture. We look forward to joining Leaf and our co-investors on this journey.