Good Agriculture, an Atlanta-based startup platform that focuses on providing business services to the farming community, has spent a lot of time out on the pitch circuit recently.
Founder and UGA graduate Alex Edquist took home the top prize during Fintech South’s Innovation Showcase Challenge in August, receiving a $25,000 prize. She also was selected as only a small number of Georgia-based companies selected to pitch during Venture Atlanta’s Startup Showcase event, where she will compete against nine other founders for $500,000 in capital.
On top of that, Edquist was able to wrap up a year-long fundraising journey two weeks ago with the close of a $650,000 pre-seed round.
The majority investors in the round include Terra Regenerative Capital, Texas-based Harvest Returns, and G-Force.
Pre-Seed Learnings
The statistics around VC dollars and female founders are grim, with female-founded companies only receiving a small fraction of all investment dollars deployed each year.
Edquist opened up about the fundraising process on LinkedIn and to Hypepotamus, saying the process came with its own ups and downs.
“There are certainly lots of frustrations (it’s time-consuming, it’s highly manual, it’s discriminatory as a female founder), but I think if I had known these things going into the process, it would have been easier to get through the grind,” she added.
Closing the pre-seed round has already helped Good Agriculture grow. Edquist said that the funding went into hiring a software engineering lead, start building out the next version of the platform, increasing marketing and sales efforts, and to building up the startup’s “working capital to support the product and delivery team.”
Now, Edquist will spend the next few weeks preparing for the Venture Atlanta stage and looking towards new way to grow the business in the coming year.
“We’re planning to raise a seed round in 2025, so the goal for Venture Atlanta is to strengthen our relationships with seed-stage investors (we’d love to have more local folks join the next round),” she added. “For the fall, it’s all about building the tech and adding customers (especially through partner organizations like ag banks) as fast as we can!”
