I don't believe in agtech miracles.

Prime Future 228: the newsletter for innovators in livestock, meat, and dairy

I don’t believe in miracles.

I mean, I believe in the baby Jesus-in-a-cow-trough kind of miracles. 

But I don’t believe in the startup claims that an agtech product, still in some stage of final development, will skyrocket from $100k in sales this year to $100mm in sales in three years. 

That would be five-loaves-and-two-fish-feeding-the-five-thousand miraculous.

Some version of that story gets pitched all 👏 the 👏 time 👏 in agtech, and I have yet to see one materialize. 

There are plenty of miracle-level valuations from the last 5 years, even a few miracle-level exit valuations, the biggest being when Monsanto acquired an effectively pre-revenue Climate Corp for ~$1B. 

That was water-into-wine level miraculous, and we aren’t likely to see a similar event in agtech soon. (Tho all I want for Christmas is to see the internal post-mortem analysis of that acquisition…)

The hangover from that transaction still lingers: some founders use the Climate Corp story as a goalpost (“See, it’s possible!”), while most acquirers view it as a flashing DANGER AHEAD sign, a stern warning of the risk of paying a premium for an unproven up-and-to-the-right growth story.

To be fair, that acquisition was in the aftermath of the dot com era when companies often went public without any revenue — only after that era would investors start looking for revenue growth at all costs, and founders would build out miraculous commercial stories accordingly. 

Let’s talk about commercial agtech miracles – and why I don’t believe in them.

Let me explain.