According to reports, Agriculture insights platform Gro Intelligence is shutting down after failing to secure enough capital to stay afloat.
Details
The company had informed remaining staff that it would be closing down, with a skeleton crew kept on to wind things down.
Between The Lines
In March, the company had secured funding and laid off 60% of its staff. This resulted in a lawsuit from former employees over alleged violations of American Labor Laws.
Zoom Out
Gro Intelligence was founded by energy commodities trader Sara Menker in 2012. It raised an $85 million series B round in January 2021 from backers including Intel Capital and Africa Internet Ventures, and was named as one of TIME’s 100 most influential companies that year.
The company had struggled recently to scale and make revenue which resulted in the removal of Sara Menker as CEO.
Digging Deeper
Gro Intelligence had signed a deal with Unilever which generated the bulk of its revenues.
One source said: “It had positioned itself as a food security platform to a small Asian country and a country in the Middle East exporting oil, without success. It had also attempted to engage the US government under a variety of guises but was only picking up bits and pieces of business here and there.”
Asked what had gone wrong, the source blamed a combination of the challenging funding environment and a “fundamental mismatch between the product and the market.
“They were chasing deals for projects that resembled bespoke consultancy work as opposed to something that would generate replicable revenue streams. They also had a number of mis-hires and until very recently, they didn’t have a CFO, so I don’t know that they were able to produce reasonable financials on a quarterly basis for investors. Sara should have brought in an operating CEO probably two years ago.”
Source: AG Funder News
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