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Food and agriculture data infrastructure company, Leaf, has raised $5 million in a seed funding round led by S2G Ventures. The round also included participation from existing investors, including Cultivian, Radicle Growth and SP Ventures. Leaf provides intuitive tools to help software developers build with farm data. Its unified farm data API (application programming interface) can send and receive user-permission data across platforms in a standardised way, "enabling companies to build more applications years ahead of schedule". The company's API can also be used to scale up products for carbon and sustainability tracking, farm management lending and insurance, biotech, land and input marketplaces, agronomy, food traceability, maintenance forecasting, farmland finance, and more.

Bailey Stockdale, CEO and co-founder of Leaf, said: "We started Leaf after experiencing the frustrations of developers working in food and agriculture first hand. Before Leaf, large and well-funded development teams would struggle for years to overcome inconsistent data access, formats, translation, organisation and integrations."

He added: "Now these same companies and teams of all sizes use Leaf to focus on building new value for their customers instead of maintaining redundant backend infrastructure". Leaf will use the funds to grow its commercial, customer and development teams globally, enhance support for new data types, as well as launch new services that enable software developers to address health, economic and environmental challenges.

Cristina Rohr, managing director at S2G Ventures, added: "Our investment in Leaf supports its continued growth and success in being a catalyst for agtech development overall. Farm data is only useful when it can be easily read and used. Leaf is rewriting the rules when it comes to building with farm data and we're excited to support them."