RALEIGH — As a farmer himself, Steven Valencsin knows firsthand the trials of working the land to maximize yields.

Now he’s made it his business helping other farmers do the same.

Through Growers Holdings – the Raleigh-based agtech company that he founded at just 23 – he has developed a unique system that analyzes farmland data. It’s called CLICK (because it’s supposed to make “all the moving pieces in agriculture” do just that), and among its many attributes: the ability to create precise fertilizer and seed recommendations within seconds, not weeks.

It can also model accurate costs and revenues per acre that help with financial planning. But perhaps most intriguing, it requires zero data entry from the farmer.

Growers Holdings CEO and founder Steven Valencsin.

“[It’s] an industry first,” says Valencsin, now 30. “The platform cleans, organizes, and stores all the soil, planting, application, and harvest data and then gets analyzed year over year to continue to drive improvements for the farmer.”

By using the platform, he says, farmers usually see three-to-five times return on investment (ROI) for farmers who have hired the company, and “bottom-line” increases of more than $100 per acre.

$7.25 million raised so far

By all accounts, farmers and investors are taking notice.

Growers Holdings recently raised $5 million from its Series A. This is in addition to another $2.25 million raised in earlier seed rounds.

The capital raised was led by St. Louis-based Lewis and Clark Ventures, and included new investors Innova Memphis and the VTC Innovation Fund. The company’s existing investors also participated, including Tiverton Advisors, Albany Private Equity Partners and Maize Partners.

“We’ve evaluated hundreds of AgTech companies,” says Lewis and Clark Principal Larry Page. “Few truly understand the complexities of delivering farm data analytics at scale the way Growers does.”

The company already operates in 15 different states from North Carolina to South Dakota and in coming months, it also plans to do a limited release of its platform to select partners in a handful of states.

“We haven’t done official rollout because we started developing it a year and a half ago,” he told WRAL TechWire. “We’re doing a limited release to select partners we feel are going to be able to deliver that same ROI and customer service that Growers has got a reputation for.”

For farmers, by farmers

Let’s rewind to 2011: Valencsin, freshly graduated from NC State University with a degree in agribusiness management, realized there was a growing disconnect between the latest state-of-the-art technology, and how farmers were making it work for them.

He knew from personal experience. He grew up on a farm himself in South Dakota before joining the military after high school and ending up in North Carolina.

Growers Holdings’s new CLICK platform that analyzes farmland data to maximize profits.

So he set about coming up with a system to collect farmland data from the farmers he worked with. Based on that information, he would design a 12-month plan for managing their land.

But as the business scaled, the company was forced to come up with its own software to keep up.

“Today in the agtech industry, data that’s being created is rather clunky and hard to work with,” explains Valencsin.  “So we had to build a system for our own business to help make the process for viewing, analyzing and executing against data much more effective and efficient.”

“Once we built that tool,” he adds, “we realized there was a great opportunity for the business to offer our tools and technologies to others who are struggling with the same things.”

Expanding direct-to-farmer model

With this latest cash infusion, the company plans to expand its direct-to-farmer model and its 30-strong team.

At its Raleigh headquarters, it expects to add five to 10 positions, including data scientists, statisticians and Geographic Information System (GIS) analysts. It will also be hiring a handful of senior developers and engineers for its Seattle office.

It also has two other offices in Dumas, Texas, and Lake Providence, Louisiana.

Meanwhile, its management team has also gotten an infusion of deep agtech experience. Ron Zink, who was previously Director of Digital Solutions at John Deere, was hired in June 2017 as Chief Technology Officer, leading product development. Gabriel Wilmoth, formerly an investment director at Syngenta Ventures, joined in December 2017 as chief operating officer.

“We’ve worked really hard to get here,” says Valencsin. “I’m a farmer myself, and maybe I understand the market a bit better. It has enabled us to develop products that I feel really land on the farm.”

Agtech startup Growers raises $4M from 6 investors, wants another $1M