FoA 301: Funding Innovation for Agriculture, People and Planet with Suma Reddy of Future Acres

Today’s episode is brought to you by Sound Agriculture: https://www.sound.ag/ Suma Reddy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suma-reddy-0285386/ Future Acres: https://www.futureacres.co/ Wavemaker Labs: https://www.wavemakerlabs.com/  JOIN THE FOA COMMUNITY: www.patreon.com/agriculture Joining me on today’s show is Suma Reddy, the co-founder and CEO of Future Acres. Suma’s company builds advanced mobility and AI solutions for farms, starting with a robot called Carry, an autonomous harvest companion that increases production efficiency, improves farmworker safety, and provides real time data and analytics. So think like a fully autonomous cart or wheelbarrow that transports table grapes from where they are picked to where they are loaded out of the vineyard.  We definitely talk more about Future Acres in this episode and Suma’s vision for the intersection of people and technology in agriculture. We also talk about the labor problems that technologies like this help solve. But mostly, we talk about ideas for funding companies like this. Especially, the venture studio that Future Acres was born out of, what they’ve learned from equity crowdfunding, and a tiny little bit on leveraging communities of people to form special purpose vehicles or SPVs which are ad hock groups of investors that participate alongside VCs or angel investors. So much fascinating stuff covered in this episode.  Suma’s career got started as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali working with smallholder farmers. From there, she joined a high growth microfinance startup in India which IPO’d and eventually sold for a couple billion dollars. Then she returned home to the U.S., and after business school jumped into climate and agriculture with renewable energy projects followed by cofounding an indoor ag startup called FarmShelf. But she felt pulled back to outdoor agriculture and she found this opportunity to start Future Acres at a venture studio, and that is where we dive into today’s episode with Future Acres CEO Suma Reddy.