FarmLogs Gets $4M Series A Venture Capital
ANN ARBOR (WWJ) -- The farm management software developer FarmLogs said Wednesday it had closed a $4 million Series A financing round led by Drive Capital, a Columbus, Ohio venture capital fund launched in 2012 by two veterans of Silicon Valley's Sequoia Capital.
FarmLogs says existing investors -- Ann Arbor-based Huron River Ventures and Chicago's Hyde Park Venture Partners and Hyde Park Angels -- also participated in the investment.
The funding comes during rapid growth for the 2-year old company, whose product is now being used by more than 5 percent of all row-crop farmers in the United States.
The company said the money will be used to add to FarmLogs staff as the company pursues an aggressive growth plan for 2014.
The company is currently hiring for six open positions: lead engineer, back-end engineers for API and feature implementation, an Android developer, a metrics and messaging tools developer, and a position involving everything from marketing to office design to recruiting, defined as "Swiss Army knife." See www.farmlogs.com/jobs.
FarmLogs CEO and co-founder Jesse Vollmar said he felt "pretty fortunate" that the deal "closed pretty quickly. We were able to find Drive Capital and get to conversations that made us feel comfortable that they were the right partner quickly."
Vollmar said the funding "gives us enough runway to help us move to the next step in the business. Now, we want to execute well on the product. We have a great foundation that has seen tremendous adoption, and we'd like to see that continue, and really increase the value we create for our customers. We're going to be kind of heads down, 100 percent focused on building a truly great, innovative product. With four million dollars, that's enough to add a few more people to the team and accelerate the pace we can move. We're under no pressure to raise another round. We'll think about that as we execute on our vision."
Some change is on the near-term horizon, however: Vollmar said he will soon be looking for between 3,000 and 5,000 square feet of office space for the company in Ann Arbor. "We're right downtown on Liberty Street, and we've got room for a few more people, but we want to make sure we have an environment where people feel really comfortable here and enjoy the time they spend here," Vollmar said.
FarmLogs designs easy-to-use web and mobile apps that bring critical data to farmers in real time, helping farmers manage and analyze the large amounts of underutilized data collected from their fields in order to make smarter, more efficient and more profitable farming decisions.
As part of the financing, Drive Capital partner and co-founder Mark Kvamme will join FarmLogs' board of directors. Prior to founding Drive Capital, Kvamme was a partner at Sequoia Capital for 12 years where he led investments in Linkedin and other successful companies.
"FarmLogs is giving farmers the technology to optimize their business that was only available to Fortune 500 businesses just a couple of years ago, " Kvamme said. "We're honored to be partnering with the exceptional entrepreneurs at FarmLogs solving such important problems for the world's farmers. "
FarmLogs CEO and co-founder Jesse Vollmar was recently named to Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30 list in the energy and industry category. The company previously raised $1 million in seed funding in January 2013.
An alumnus of the winter 2012 cohort of the Silicon Valley company accelerator program Y Combinator, FarmLogs was founded in 2011 by Vollmar and high school classmate Brad Koch, both the products of farm families in Michigan's Thumb.
More at www.farmlogs.com.
Drive Capital invests in IT, financial services, consumer products and health care services in a midwest-Great Lakes region bordered by Pittsburgh to Kansas City to Minneapolis and back.