Sara Menker, CEO of Gro Intelligence. Image Credits: Gro Intelligence
“One of my colleagues was buying guns and gold as a way to protect himself from the world collapsing. And I was like, Listen, if the world’s collapsing, I just want to eat.”
Sarah Menker, CEO of Gro Intelligence
One would be hard-pressed to find a startup that held as much promise within the agricultural sector as Gro Intelligence. The startup was hailed as the Google Maps of the agritech industry, with several news outlets hailing them as the future, calling their data platform the key to unlocking a new era of abundance. From 2014 to 2024, the startup was sitting on a stash of over $117 million in funding from various investors. Who would have thought that the firm that promised food security would be unable to secure itself from the startup graveyard?
How Gro Intelligence Started
Gro Intelligence was founded in 2012 by energy commodities trader, Sara Menker, with the aim of providing decision-making tools and analytics to a wide array of clients from food and agricultural companies to governments, investment banks, consulting firms, and universities.
Gro combined satellite imagery with data on rainfall, drought, vegetative health and density, soil moisture and and land surface temperature, and data from USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), or Brazil’s IBGE, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. It boasted of having the world’s largest agriculture and climate-related database, drawing on more than 170,000 data sets from hundreds of public and private sources.
Initial Success
Deploying the power of AI and a large database, Gro sought to peer into the secrets of weather patterns, soil composition, and satellite data. The resulting dataset was a powerful weapon in the hands of any company that was able to lay its hands on it. With Gro’s insights, they could predict crop yields with uncanny accuracy, navigate the ever-shifting currents of the market, and predict the uncertain future of our climate.
Gro Intelligence’s revolutionary vision held an incredible allure for investors, causing them to flock to the company. By 2021, the company had amasses a $117 million cash pile, courtesy of tech giants like Intel Capital and Africa Internet Ventures who rushed to the forefront of the agricultural revolution. The company soon set its sights beyond the frontiers of Kenya, aiming to onboard the world’s most prosperous companies.
The Fall…and The Death
With the passage of time, it became evident that Gro was unable to translate the potential of its data into commercial success. Because it was unable to tailor its offerings to the needs of the larger farming population, it leaned heavily on a few big players like Unilever for its revenue, a move that proved both costly and unsustainable.
It all came to an head in 2024, as the startup began to struggle to pay its employees. The company’s board attempted to save the sinking ship by removing Sara Menker from her position as CEO, replacing her with James Coriello. This leadership change was also followed by a brutal 60% workplace layoff, leaving the company downsized. Gro Intelligence’s efforts to secure some emergency bridge funding in March 2024 were unsuccessful because investors already lost confidence in the startup.
Legal and regulatory challenges nailed the coffin for Gro Intelligence, as allegations of labour law violations and a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation came to light. In June 2024, Gro Intelligence shut down for good, before it was eventually acquired by Almanac in November 2024.
