Granular announces $18.7M Series B financing

Granular, a company that provides farm management software and analytics tools, announced the close of its Series B financing. Tao Capital Partners led the round and was joined by Emory Investment Management, Fall Line Capital, and H. Barton Asset Management. Granular’s previous investors, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, and Khosla Ventures, also invested in this second round. “We are excited to work with this top group of new and returning investors to become the leading provider of software and analytics to the global agricultural industry,” said Sid Gorham, Granular’s co-founder and CEO. “We are well on our way toward the first step of getting the best 500 producers in North America on the Granular platform and this funding will accelerate our progress.”

Introduced 18 months ago, Granular is expanding its team of software and data science experts in San Francisco, along with a group of farming industry experts deployed near its customers nationwide. The funding will go primarily toward expanding this team to provide more localized support, in addition to extending the product into the specialty crop and livestock segments. The round of funding brings the total capital raised by the company to $25.2M.

“Farming is one of the world’s largest and most important industries, but has been underserved by information technology companies,” said Christopher Olin, Principal at Tao Capital Partners. “We are thrilled to back the Granular team as they use data science to help farms become more efficient businesses and respond to the challenges and opportunities of the future.”
Granular provides farmers with a new kind of farm management software, which brings together financial, operational and agronomic information in real-time to give growers an accurate view of their operation throughout the entire growing season.

“The Granular team has made tremendous progress since their first financing 18 months ago,” said John O’Farrell, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “We see an opportunity to build a very large and valuable software company in this vertical and Granular has great traction with the industry’s largest, most sophisticated buyers.”

Granular announced the financing at GROW 2015, the company’s first farm CEO summit in San Francisco. The user conference was attended by farmers representing some of the largest operations in North America, as well as Granular’s Industry Advisory Board and farmland investment funds.

“We’d never been able before to get everything we do – from operations to budget to inventory tracking – all on one software package,” said Mark Bryant of Bryant Ag, Granular customer in Ohio. “Granular recognizes what ag is becoming, and they give me the tools I need to operate like a Fortune 500 company.”