Hoosier ag-tech startup takes top honors at national Ag Innovation Challenge
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INDIANAPOLIS - An Indianapolis-based ag-tech startup took the $100,000 top prize that this year’s American Farm Bureau Federation Ag Innovation Challenge.
Gripp has developed a software platform designed to help farmers keep records of any assets on their farms and improve communication among everyone in their operations.
“Gripp basically allows farmers to track anything important to their operation,” co-founder and CEO Tracey Wiedmeyer said. “It could be things on tires, could be fixed equipment, people, trees, basically anywhere they’d want to keep any type of notes or digital information, reminders, manuals, around pieces of equipment.”
Wiedmeyer told Inside INdiana Business that the platform fills a technological gap for farmers across the country.
“I would say less than 2% of the time we see a farmer across the country using some sort of software to solve this, it’s typically software that wasn’t built for ag,” he said. “It’s typically like a work order management system or a fleet software. The problem is those things weren’t built for ag.”
Farm Bureau Ag Innovation Challenge is designed for Farm Bureau members to showcase business innovations being developed for agriculture.
Gripp was one of several hundred applicants that submitted a video pitch last June. In October, the pitches were narrowed down to 10 in October, where the participants did a seven-minute, in-person pitch to a panel of industry experts.
The panel further narrowed the field down to four finalists, which each received $10,000 and competed at the AFBF National Convention in San Antonio, Texas.
“Winning the Ag Innovation Challenge represents continued validation to not only the challenges facing farmers today but also the way we’ve decided to solve them,” said Wiedmeyer. “Farmers need cost-effective, no-nonsense tools that work for them.”
When asked what he thought made Gripp stand out from the other finalists, Wiedmeyer said his platform follows a trend among farms where a greater spotlight is being placed on equipment maintenance due to higher costs.
“We hear quite often the days of people buying the million-dollar combine every year basically over,” he said. “Now you have a much bigger appetite there to put the time in, change the culture of care on your team, to make sure [the equipment is] being taken care of.”
Wiedmeyer also noted that the regulatory burden for farmers continues to grow, and that requires keeping accurate records. Historically, he said, doing that digitally has been difficult for farm owners.
“No farmer we’ve met wants to bring four or five different platforms in and train the folks that are operating and doing the maintenance and doing the record keeping, and train them on four or five apps, which is why they’ve historically stayed in these analog methods,” he said. “So that makes Gripp this broad application, to give you one view of your operation, anything you own that’s important.”
Gripp commercially launched its platform last March and is currently used on about 70 farming operations.
The next step for Gripp, Wiedmeyer said, is awareness. He and his team are traveling the country to trade shows and conferences to get the word out about Gripp and boost sales.
Long-term, Wiedmeyer said he wants to use Gripp to create a network effect in agriculture, whereby farmers can get information about their equipment from their dealer, original equipment manufacturers, mechanics and others so that the most up-to-date information is available at their fingertips.
“Indiana Farm Bureau is so proud of what Gripp has accomplished on the national stage at AFBF convention,” Indiana Farm Bureau President Randy Kron said in a news release. “Indiana is a tech hub here in the Midwest, and this win spotlights how entrepreneurs in the ag innovation space can efficiently support farmers in their mission to feed the world.”
The other final four teams that participated in the challenge were Labby from New York, which was named runner-up in the contest, as well as Halio from Utah and RhizeBio from North Carolina.