Thoughts from the Voyager Capital AgTech CEO Conference

Last week, I spent a day in Seattle at the AgTech CEO conference put on by Erik Benson and Voyager Capital. It was a great event. I enjoyed the opportunity to be in a room with many founders, investors and farmers and has some great conversations, and learned about some new businesses.

There were a few things that stood out to me that I want to highlight.

Currently, AgTech has its challenges for building a business or raising money, whether you are an investor or an ag focused entrepreneur.

Farm related agtech funding came in at roughly $9 billion in 2025, ticking up about 7% year over year even as broader deal activity remained selective. Funding is down over 60% from its 2021 peak.

Liquidity remains the outsized area of concern limiting further funding. Of the ~2,500 venture-backed agtech startups founded between 2015 and 2020, only 152 have reached a confirmed exit, according to PitchBook data, with several high-profile public exits (eg: IPO) subsequently shedding most of their value. Over the past decade, pure upstream agtech has taken on roughly $60 billion in capital with less than $5 billion in publicly disclosed exits.

Funding is challenged, there aren't many exits (and current valuations are likely still elevated from where they should be), and commercial traction for a lot of companies isn't growing the way anyone hoped. On top, in talking to many agtech venture capitalists looking to raise more money, it is difficult for them to find capital. Of all the places for a high net-worth individual, or family office, or anyone with capital that can put their money anywhere, are they going to put it into a sector that has returned so little after such (relatively) large amounts invested? I doubt it.

An investor I spoke with last week described their own portfolio as having several companies that are trying to raise money and “struggling brutally” to do so.

Building a business is hard and building a business in agriculture has proven excruciatingly difficult.

But I think sometimes the industry is it’s own worst enemy, too.

We glaze over the specifics and the nuance and we don’t have the hard, blunt conversations required to move the needle and help bypass the challenges.

We point to some future state, insist all is well, and leave every event feeling good instead of digging into what could be better.

Now, it's not lost on me that I merely write a newsletter, and that's easy to do from the cheap seats. But cheering for the industry isn't the same as helping it, and sometimes progress takes some harder conversations.

In that spirit, here are a few things that stood out to me from the event. I think they're symptoms of the industry overall, and not a knock on the conversations from the event.

At events there are always panels full of very smart people. But often, specifically on important and nuanced topics, we skim over the details.