TerraBlaster Raises $12.5 million Seed Round

Index:

Overview
Current Soil Sampling Dynamics
The System
Enabling Precision, GTM and Acquirers
What Else Can Improve with Soil Testing?
Final Thoughts

Overview

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TerraBlaster announced it has raised a $12.5 million seed round led by Ulu Ventures, bringing total capital raised to $16.5 million. Khosla Ventures, Trailhead Capital and Builders Vision also participated, along with Ag Startup Engine, Artesian, Reservoir and Sunna.

TerraBlaster is a startup bringing technology used by NASA to agriculture.

Its core innovation is a laser-based soil analysis system. The TerraBlaster sensor uses Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) – a technique that “blasts” the soil with laser pulses, vaporizing tiny soil particles into plasma, and then reads the emitted light spectrum to instantly determine elemental composition.

By breaking molecules into ions and detecting their spectral “fingerprints,” the system can test soil nutrients in real-time.

Current Soil Sampling Dynamics

Today, soil sampling is:

very manual — requires an individual to physically go out to test specific spots.
low resolution — due to cost, the number of samples taken is usually quite low. Consider than 1 acre of land in the top 6” weights approximately 2 million lbs. Typically, a soil sample will include at most 2lbs of soil from that one acre, and that’s if doing a grid sampling approach. 2lbs / 2 million lbs means that a single soil test is measuring approximately .00001% of an acre. Then we must factor that soil varies by the inch, horizontally, and vertically, which illustrates just how little we are currently seeing of a grid or a field.
has a timing issue — often the sampling is done months before the crop is planted, meaning the soil nutrient levels may have changed between sampling and putting the crop in, or you simply have to wait multiple days for a test if done closer to the necessary date.

This all contributes to suboptimal understanding of what nutrients are in the soil and where and what fertilizer to place where — not to mention, leaves opportunity for better managing varieties, seed density and other actions (eg: tillage).

The Blaster 1000 system is intended to improve the resolution and speed at which a farmer/agronomist can acquire soil information to improve the decision making process around fertility and other agronomic decisions: