When Charles Julius began working at Motive Technologies Inc., he was tasked with crafting and scaling industry-specific logistics strategies for the many different sectors it served.
That experience led to founding Loamy Technologies Inc., a Playa Vista-based food supply chain management platform.
The company raised $6 million in seed funding on Tuesday.
“We had to build a cross-functional platform that served any industry with commercial vehicles, trucks, fuel equipment, and oil and gas. But the food and beverage sector was materially underserved versus the others,” Julius said. “We saw the biggest companies still needing to use very complex spreadsheets, text messages, sticky notes, all sorts of non-digital ways of managing their core daily operations.”
Zeal Capital Partners led the funding round, with participation from Venice-based Amplify.LA and Supply Change Capital, another unnamed Los Angeles-based venture firm. Loamy has raised a total of $10 million since it was founded in 2024.
Streamlining the process
Loamy is working to take all parts of the food supply chain – from growing crops to safely storing and shipping items – and house them under one unified system.
It’s a hard market to crack. Perishable food needs to meet strict oversight requirements like traceability, which allows the federal government to quickly manage produce recalls. Then there are the grocery stores, which provide a spec sheet on the color, size and quality requirements produce has to meet before it reaches them.
If the growing season sees more rain than usual, or a different fertilizer, the entire yield of the season might not pass the test.
“You grow for a long period of time, invest all this money and then the farmer looks to sell this product and they simply can’t because it can’t meet spec or the visual qualities and what the retailer requires,” Julius said. “These types of food products often get thrown away.”
Loamy uses artificial intelligence, field and weather data and satellite imagery to detect plant stress and predict if the yield will meet grocery standards. This allows farmers to more quickly redirect selling produce to another customer, like a juice manufacturer or a prepared foods processor.
“Platforms that connect inventory, logistics, labor and finance have a significant opportunity to reshape how businesses operate,” Nasir Qadree, founder and managing partner of Zeal Capital Partners, said in a statement.
An outlier
While Loamy has grown its revenue 30 times year over year, other food and agriculture startups are struggling. According to PitchBook, 57% of startups in that sector with known outcomes have outright shuttered, making up $8.2 billion in capital that never materialized.
“Companies locked into high fixed costs (plants, debt, specialized equipment) in categories where customers were either unwilling or unable to pay a meaningful premium for ‘sustainable’ or novel products,”
Alex Federick, an agri-foodtech analyst at PitchBook, said in an analyst note.
Indeed, farmers that operate on razor-thin margins are often hesitant to invest in an unproven product, per a McKinsey & Co. report. And because of the disparate and siloed parts of the supply chain, new technology often adds yet another step instead of streamlining the process.
“They don’t necessarily chase technology for the sake of technology, they chase results,” Julius said. “If you can actually offer them business value and prove it quickly and also deliver in a way that doesn’t take months to get going and upsets the entire business operation, you can actually prove some real value.”
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