Granular, a farm management software and analytics provider, has raised $18.7 million in new funding to streamline operations on large, professionally managed farms.
Tao Capital Partners, the late stage fund that counts Tesla, Uber and SolarCity among its portfolio companies, led the Series B round.
Existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures participated, with help from Emory Investment Management, Fall Line Capital, and H. Barton Asset Management.
Granular provides software to manage all aspects of running a farm, from the daily tasks out in the field to the budgeting and financial work in the office. It integrates with a farmer’s existing hardware, including tractors, drones and scales, to collect data from the field.
Everyone on the farm uses Granular’s mobile app to access a real-time work schedule and task list. Workers can see exactly where everyone is on a map, and exactly when each task is completed.
“A 10,000 acre farm might be spread out over 100 square miles of fields that are not right next to each other, so you have to figure out the right order to do everything in and how to optimize that,” says Granular founder Sid Gorham. “Right now everyone’s doing that with two-way radio and paper and pencil.”
In the office, Granular’s analytics dashboard helps farmers understand how each individual field is performing to make strategic decisions around planting and harvest.
“Right now farms understand profitability at the total level, but with Granular, they can understand the profitability of each field and each crop,” says Gorham.
Since Granular launched its product in March of last year, the company has signed up several dozen large U.S. farms spanning nearly 1 million acres of land. Existing Granular customers include farms producing corn for Maker’s Mark and ingredients for Chipotle.
“By this time next year, we want to have the Farming 500 — the biggest and best farms in the country — on our system,” says Gorham. “We really want to serve the leaders in the market.”