Funding Growth of Agribusinesses

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

We often hear of entrepreneurs seeing opportunity to bring technology to agriculture and raising millions of dollars with little more than an idea.Well early stage funding for agtech companies has become a lot harder to come by, and investors like Jim Taylor at Forage Capital Partners are focused on companies that have a proven track record and a path to profitability.

Taylor... "We like businesses that have been around for a little while that have developed products or services or technologies that that people are paying for. And so we're not afraid of companies that are losing money as long as the gross margin part of it is healthy. What we don't want to do is, we're not scientists, we're not, you know, PhDs, we don't have, you know, that kind of background, and so, you know, trying to assess, you know, whether a technology or a product or service will work, uh, whether it's effective, we don't want to pay to retrain customers to use what we have. We want to invest in companies that have already done that kind of work. And so that's the growth equity, right? We don't mind, we don't mind burning cash to grow the, we won't take X, I guess the best way is we want to take execution risk, not technology risk. Cause we feel like our backgrounds we're good. We've done lots. We've been, you know, some of us have been operators before, and so we're good with execution. And we'll leave the science to the scientists and the developers and that sort of thing."

Forage Capital Partners is a growth equity fund for ag and food business solutions.