Regenerative Agriculture: what are the top startups?

What actually counts as a regenerative agriculture startup?

We count a startup as part of regenerative agriculture when its product directly changes, finances or measures what happens on the farm.

That sounds simple, but the category gets messy fast. Pivot Bio sells nitrogen-fixing microbes. Indigo pays farmers for verified practice changes and sells the resulting environmental value. Regrow helps large food companies run farm programs. EarthOptics measures what is happening underground. All four belong here because their products are tied directly to changes in soil, inputs, emissions or farming practices.

We are stricter with companies such as Terradot and Lithos. Both spread crushed rock on agricultural land, and both can improve soil chemistry, but companies buy their main product as permanent carbon removal. We see them primarily as carbon-removal companies that happen to work on farms.

The same filter keeps generic precision-agriculture software out. A tool that helps a farmer apply fertilizer more accurately may contribute to regenerative farming, but that alone does not make the company a regenerative agriculture startup.

This leaves us with a useful definition: startups whose growth depends on making farming less input-intensive, improving soil or biodiversity, financing practice changes, or proving that those changes happened. That is the market we rank below.

Is regenerative agriculture funding still alive right now?

Regenerative agriculture funding is still active, although investors have become much less willing to fund giant promises without commercial proof.

In our review of 31 disclosed pure-play regenerative agriculture equity rounds across a recent 24-month period, startups raised about $319 million. The median round was below $8 million, only one exceeded $50 million and none crossed $100 million.

Compare that with the previous cycle. Pivot Bio raised $430 million in a single Series D in 2021. Indigo had already raised roughly $850 million by early 2020, then added hundreds of millions more. That era produced companies with unusually large balance sheets before anyone really knew how big the commercial market would become.

These days, the money is spreading across more specific problems. EarthOptics raised $38.1 million after combining its soil-sensing technology with Pattern Ag's biological analytics. Varaha raised the first $20 million tranche of a planned Series B while also attracting separate project finance. Rize raised a $31 million Series B in July 2026, including $20 million of equity and $11 million of debt, after expanding its low-emission rice program to 17,000 farmers and more than 50,000 hectares.

Smaller companies are still getting funded too. Seqana raised €3.2 million in June 2026 to expand its satellite-based soil measurement beyond carbon into broader soil-health indicators.

So investors have not abandoned regenerative agriculture. They are asking for much clearer evidence of farmer adoption, corporate buyers, verified outcomes or a product that saves money on the farm.

How are we deciding which regenerative agriculture startups are actually the best?

We rank regenerative agriculture startups mainly on evidence that farmers or companies repeatedly use and pay for what they have built.

Funding helps, but historical fundraising can badly distort this market. Monitored acreage creates the same problem. Regrow can monitor 1.4 billion acres without regenerative practices being implemented on every one of those acres.

We therefore give more weight to what happens after a company signs up a field. Did the farmer change practices? Did somebody pay the farmer? Was the environmental result independently verified? Did a customer come back for a larger contract? Can the company still create value if carbon-credit prices fall?

That approach favors companies with very different strengths. Indigo has large verified soil-carbon issuance. Pivot Bio has direct product adoption across millions of acres. Agreena has moved a huge European cropland project through Verra verification. Regrow has become embedded inside corporate agricultural programs. Boomitra has translated millions of acres of regenerative grazing into issued carbon credits.

The point is to compare proof of use rather than website footprint.

Startup	Strongest evidence we see	Main weakness
Indigo	More than 2M tonnes of verified soil-carbon impact and a 2.85M-credit Microsoft agreement	Expensive history and meaningful exposure to carbon markets
Pivot Bio	Nearly 15M cumulative acres of product use and large field-testing base	Still has to turn enormous funding into durable profitability
Agreena	~5M hectares on platform and 2.3M Verra-issued credits	Carbon economics remain important
Regrow	100+ corporate customers and major supply-chain programs	Monitored acreage is much larger than actual transitioned acreage
Boomitra	3.03M-credit verified Mexico project across ~4M acres	Revenue relies heavily on carbon buyers
Varaha	199K+ farms plus major project finance and corporate carbon demand	Rapid international execution adds complexity
Klim	900K+ hectares and 4,000+ registered farmers	Smaller verified outcome base than Agreena
Rize	17K farmers and 50K+ hectares after roughly 10x growth in two years	Still far smaller in land footprint than the leaders
EarthOptics	Deep soil-data stack and repeated growth funding	Enables the transition rather than running most of it
Loam Bio	Commercial microbial product built specifically to increase stable soil carbon	Commercial scale is still catching up with the science

Is Indigo still the top regenerative agriculture startup today?

We still put Indigo first because its soil-carbon program has reached a combination of scale, verification and repeat corporate demand that nobody else quite matches yet.

The strongest number is no longer Indigo's historical fundraising. In February 2026, Indigo announced its fifth U.S. carbon issuance, taking cumulative verified reductions and removals across its U.S. cropland program above two million tonnes. That fifth issuance alone included 1.1 million independently verified credits.

Microsoft's buying pattern gives us another useful test. The company first bought 40,000 tonnes from Indigo in 2024, then 60,000 in 2025. In early 2026, Microsoft signed a 12-year agreement for another 2.85 million soil-carbon removal credits.

The progression is much more interesting than the final contract on its own. Microsoft went from 40,000 to 60,000 and then to 2.85 million tonnes. A customer that repeatedly increases its commitment is stronger evidence than a one-off announcement.

Indigo has also become a more focused company lately. In June 2026, its Source software business was combined with CIBO Technologies to form a separate company called Terion. Indigo Carbon and Indigo Biologicals stayed inside Indigo.

That move changes how we should describe Indigo. The company is becoming more concentrated around biological products and regenerative agriculture programs instead of trying to own every layer of agricultural software.

Indigo's history is still messy. It raised extraordinary amounts of capital and spent years trying businesses that never became the agricultural operating system once imagined. We do not give it credit for that. What keeps Indigo at number one is the part that now works: farmers implementing regenerative practices, independently issued outcomes and large buyers returning for more.

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest regenerative agriculture market report.

Is Pivot Bio actually stronger than the soil-carbon startups?

Pivot Bio may have the best underlying business model in regenerative agriculture because farmers can buy its product for agronomic reasons even when carbon markets are weak.

Pivot Bio's microbes fix nitrogen around crop roots, allowing farmers to replace part of their conventional fertilizer. Its technology has now been used across nearly 15 million cumulative acres in North America, according to the company, with validation spanning thousands of fields and more than 2,500 growers.

The freshest field results make the commercial argument clearer. Across 134 U.S. trials with 129 growers during the 2025 season, Pivot reported that farmers using PROVEN G3 replaced an average of 33 pounds of conventional nitrogen per acre while gaining 2.1 bushels of corn per acre against the growers' standard practice. In cotton trials covering more than 30,000 acres across two seasons, growers replaced up to 20% of conventional nitrogen and averaged more than 50 additional pounds of lint per acre.

These are company-reported field results, so we would still want more large independent datasets before treating every number as universal. Pivot does have peer-reviewed work with universities, including research from the University of Illinois showing that its engineered microbes can increase nitrogen availability to cereal crops.

What separates Pivot from most carbon platforms is the buyer. The farmer is buying nitrogen performance. Environmental benefits come alongside the farm economics.

That becomes especially important when fertilizer prices jump. Pivot responded to recent nitrogen-market volatility by increasing production and launching a multiyear price and supply assurance program. The company is now trying to sell reliability as well as sustainability.

If we ranked regenerative agriculture companies purely on resilience of the business model, Pivot could easily be number one.

Is Agreena the clear regenerative agriculture leader in Europe?

Agreena is currently the strongest regenerative agriculture startup in Europe because it has moved millions of hectares from enrollment into independently verified climate outcomes.

Agreena says its platform now covers roughly five million hectares and more than 2,500 farmers across 20 European countries. Size alone would not impress us much because enrolled acreage can be a soft metric.

The harder achievement came in 2025. Agreena's flagship cropland project became the first large-scale agricultural project verified under Verra's VM0042 methodology and received 2.3 million Verified Carbon Units across more than 1.6 million hectares. Those credits represented roughly 1.2 million tonnes of avoided emissions and 1.1 million tonnes of removals.

The company then added another useful layer. Its Scope 3 project across Hungary, Poland and the UK received SustainCERT verification, giving companies a way to fund reductions inside agricultural supply chains rather than simply buying offset credits.

Corporate demand has widened as well. Agreena said its corporate customer base doubled during 2025, with customers including Louis Dreyfus Company, Ryanair and Radisson Hotel Group. More recently, it appointed Giant Ventures co-founder Cameron McLain as board chair as the company moves into what it describes as its next commercial phase.

Klim is the obvious challenger. Klim has more than 900,000 hectares under management, more than 4,000 farmers registered on its platform and corporate programs with companies including ADM, Nestlé and ARYZTA. ADM's German re:generations program, run with Klim, reached its initial target of roughly 60,000 acres by the end of 2025.

Agreena still leads because independent verification has caught up with its huge acreage claims. Klim has the more interesting opportunity to close the gap if corporate insetting becomes more important than selling standalone credits.

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest regenerative agriculture market report.

Is Regrow the company big food brands use to run regenerative agriculture programs?

Regrow has the strongest claim to being the software and data layer behind large corporate regenerative agriculture programs.

Regrow serves more than 100 organizations and monitors roughly 1.4 billion acres of agricultural land. Large customers and partners have included General Mills and Cargill, with the platform used to decide where programs should run, recruit farmers, model changes and measure outcomes.

We have to be careful with the 1.4 billion-acre figure. It describes land Regrow can monitor rather than land already converted to regenerative farming.

The smaller numbers tell us more about real adoption. Regrow says programs run through its platform are projected to abate around 1.4 million tonnes of CO2e. The company has also reported tens of millions of dollars flowing to farmers through programs supported by its technology.

A food company may have thousands of farms somewhere inside its supply chain and still have no practical way to decide which farmers should change what, how much to pay them or how to calculate the result. Regrow sells the machinery for doing that.

Its position also looks stronger after Indigo moved its Source business into Terion. Terion will become a serious competitor because it combines CIBO's modeling technology with Indigo Source's program infrastructure, but it is effectively a newly assembled company. Regrow already has years of live programs behind it.

Regrow ranks below Indigo, Pivot and Agreena in our overall list because the environmental outcome belongs partly to the corporate program rather than Regrow itself. For companies trying to run regenerative agriculture across a supply chain, though, Regrow may already be the most important startup in the category.

Are Boomitra and Varaha the strongest regenerative agriculture challengers outside the US and Europe?

Boomitra and Varaha are the two regenerative agriculture companies we would watch most closely outside the US and Europe, although they have reached scale in very different ways.

Boomitra now has the stronger verified project. In February 2026, Verra approved 3.03 million soil-carbon credits from Boomitra's Northern Mexico Grassland Restoration project. The project covers about four million acres of the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts and works with 158 ranching families.

That is a major jump from signing up ranchers to producing an independently issued asset. Boomitra subsequently began distributing carbon revenue to participating ranchers. Across its wider portfolio, the company says it works with more than 150,000 farmers and ranchers on roughly five million acres across four continents.

Varaha is moving fastest on farmer expansion and project finance. The Indian company currently reports more than 199,000 farms across about 399,000 hectares and almost two million tonnes of CO2e sequestered.

Capital is arriving from several directions. Varaha raised $20 million as the first tranche of a planned Series B in early 2026. Separately, Mirova committed $30 million to Varaha's Kheti regenerative agriculture project in India. That project aims to reach more than 337,000 smallholders across 675,000 hectares in Haryana and Punjab.

Varaha also has large technology-company buyers across its broader carbon portfolio. Google and Microsoft have both signed carbon-removal purchases connected to Varaha biochar projects.

We currently rank Boomitra slightly higher because 3.03 million approved credits give us harder evidence of delivered scale. Varaha has the steeper growth curve and could overtake it quickly if the huge Kheti expansion converts planned acreage into verified outcomes.

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest regenerative agriculture market report.

Who is actually winning the soil-measurement part of regenerative agriculture?

EarthOptics is the strongest dedicated soil-measurement company we see today, with Loam Bio, Seqana and several smaller specialists attacking different parts of the same problem.

EarthOptics became more interesting after merging with Pattern Ag. EarthOptics already measured physical properties such as compaction, nutrients and soil carbon. Pattern Ag added soil biology and pathogen analysis. The combined company can now build a much richer picture of what is happening in a field before a grower decides what to plant or apply.

The business has also moved closer to everyday farm economics. Its Total Farm service launched at $4 per acre, combining physical soil sensing, biological analysis, yield data and satellite information into fertility and crop-management recommendations. Investors followed with another $38.1 million round in late 2025.

Loam Bio attacks the problem from the other direction: change the soil rather than only measure it. Its CarbonBuilder fungal seed treatment is designed to move more plant carbon into stable soil-carbon pools. Between 2023 and 2025, Loam reported 51 U.S. corn and soybean small-plot trials with an average increase of around 1.7 tonnes of CO2e per acre relative to untreated controls. In Australia, CarbonBuilder is already sold commercially across wheat, barley, canola and pulses.

Seqana is much earlier, but its timing is interesting. After raising €3.2 million in June 2026, it is expanding from satellite-based soil-carbon estimates into wider soil-health measurement for food, fiber and fuel companies.

This part of regenerative agriculture could end up being unusually valuable. Every large transition program eventually runs into the same question: how do we prove something changed without spending so much on sampling that the economics stop working?

Can soil-carbon startups really measure what they claim?

Soil carbon can be measured well enough to support commercial programs, but small changes are much harder to prove than many startup pitches make them sound.

A field does not contain one uniform amount of carbon. Soil varies across a few meters, across depths and across seasons. Sampling location, laboratory method and weather can all affect the result.

That creates a difficult statistical problem. A farmer might genuinely improve soil carbon while the measured difference remains small compared with natural variation. Research comparing laboratories has even found that measurement differences between labs can approach the size of the management effects researchers are trying to detect.

The practice itself also matters. Large agricultural datasets show that cover crops generally create a larger carbon effect than simply moving to no-till, while results vary heavily by soil, climate and management history.

This is why we pay attention to issuance rather than modeled future tonnes. Indigo has now produced five consecutive U.S. carbon issuances. Agreena has moved 2.3 million tonnes through Verra verification. Boomitra has reached 3.03 million approved credits from its Mexican grassland project. Those milestones do not remove the scientific uncertainty, but they show that the projects survived outside auditing and registry processes rather than remaining internal estimates.

Measurement companies should also benefit from the difficulty. EarthOptics combines direct sensing and sampling. Loam uses direct soil measurement inside its carbon programs. Seqana and similar companies are trying to reduce how much physical sampling is necessary by using remote sensing and machine learning.

The soil-carbon market becomes more credible as measurement gets harder to game and cheaper to repeat.

Which regenerative agriculture startups would survive a carbon-credit slump?

Pivot Bio, EarthOptics and the enterprise program companies look best positioned if carbon-credit prices fall sharply.

Pivot Bio has the cleanest case because farmers already spend money on nitrogen. If its microbes reliably replace part of that nitrogen at an attractive price, the product still has a reason to exist without a carbon buyer.

EarthOptics works in a similar way. Better knowledge of soil fertility, pathogens and compaction can improve farm decisions even when carbon is worth nothing. The carbon market expands the opportunity, but normal agronomy can support the product.

Regrow and Klim sit somewhere in the middle. Their corporate customers increasingly care about Scope 3 emissions, supply-chain resilience, regulatory reporting and sourcing risk. Food companies will still have those problems during a weak voluntary carbon market.

Agreena has been moving in the same direction by adding verified Scope 3 programs alongside carbon credits. Indigo also has biological products and agricultural programs beyond standalone credit sales.

Boomitra and Varaha have more exposure because carbon finance directly funds much of their farmer economics. That does not make their models weak. Long-term purchases, project finance and high-quality verified credits can produce attractive businesses. It does mean that demand from carbon buyers matters more.

We would therefore place a higher long-term premium on companies where improving the farm already has an economic payoff and environmental finance adds another revenue stream on top.

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest regenerative agriculture market report.

Which regenerative agriculture startups are moving fastest right now?

Varaha, Rize, Klim and Loam Bio have the clearest current momentum among companies that are still climbing our ranking.

Varaha has fresh growth capital, major project finance, nearly 200,000 farms already onboarded and a planned expansion that could add hundreds of thousands more farmers. Few regenerative agriculture companies are increasing financing and field reach at the same time on that scale.

Rize deserves much more attention than it received in our earlier ranking. The Southeast Asian rice company says it has grown roughly tenfold in two years to 17,000 smallholder farmers and more than 50,000 hectares across Vietnam and Indonesia. Its July 2026 Series B brought in $31 million, including capital from BNP Paribas Asset Management, The Rockefeller Foundation, Temasek and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

Rize also sells an actual crop. It has already shipped 1,500 tonnes of low-emission rice to markets including Europe, Canada, Australia and Singapore. That gives the company several ways to make money from the same transition: agronomy, traceability, lower emissions and access to higher-value buyers.

Klim keeps expanding its corporate implementation work. The platform now reports more than 900,000 hectares under management, 4,000 registered farmers and more than 25 supply-chain partners. Its projects with ADM, Nestlé and ARYZTA give us better evidence than another software launch would.

Loam Bio is moving from promising science into commercial proof. CarbonBuilder is now commercially available in Australia and the US, and a recent Australian project generated carbon credits using the company's fungal technology. Its U.S. product data now covers dozens of field trials across corn and soybeans.

Seqana is earlier and much smaller, but its recent funding shows where the next wave is forming: investors increasingly want technology that can measure soil health across entire supply chains rather than carbon alone.

So, what are the top regenerative agriculture startups today?

We rank Indigo first overall, followed by Pivot Bio and Agreena, while Regrow, Boomitra and Varaha form the next group of companies that already have real scale.

Indigo keeps the top spot because verified soil-carbon issuance and Microsoft's repeat buying give us unusually strong evidence that its core regenerative agriculture business works. The recent creation of Terion narrows Indigo's scope, but we actually think that makes the remaining company easier to judge.

Pivot Bio is second and has a legitimate argument for first place if we care most about farm economics. Nearly 15 million cumulative acres of adoption is difficult to dismiss, and farmers do not need a carbon market to understand the value of replacing expensive nitrogen.

Agreena takes third because Europe now has a regenerative agriculture platform operating across roughly five million hectares with 2.3 million Verra-issued credits behind it. Regrow remains the strongest corporate software layer, while Boomitra has suddenly become one of the hardest soil-carbon companies to ignore after its record-scale Mexico issuance.

Varaha has the highest chance of moving several positions upward. Klim is building a serious European supply-chain business. Rize enters our top ten because its recent growth in Southeast Asian rice is too substantial to treat as an early experiment anymore.

EarthOptics and Loam Bio round out the list for a different reason. They own pieces of the technical stack that become more valuable as the market grows: understanding the soil and changing its biology.

The ranking will probably move a lot over the next few years. For now, the clearest winners are the companies that have moved beyond promising regenerative agriculture and can show farmers using the product, companies paying for it and measurable outcomes coming out the other side.

Rank	Startup	Why we rank it here	What could move it higher or lower
1	Indigo	Large verified soil-carbon program, repeat corporate demand and biologicals business	Needs to prove the focused post-Terion business can grow efficiently
2	Pivot Bio	Nearly 15M cumulative acres and strong direct farmer economics	Could take #1 if adoption keeps growing and profitability follows
3	Agreena	~5M hectares and 2.3M Verra-issued credits	Scope 3 growth could make the business less dependent on credit markets
4	Regrow	Deeply embedded in large corporate regenerative agriculture programs	Needs more public evidence tying its huge monitored footprint to actual practice changes
5	Boomitra	3.03M approved credits from a ~4M-acre Mexico project plus global farmer reach	Continued credit sales and repeat issuance would strengthen the case
6	Varaha	199K+ farms, rapid financing growth and huge smallholder expansion plans	Could move into the top five quickly if Kheti scales as planned
7	Klim	900K+ hectares, 4,000+ farmers and credible corporate insetting projects	More independently verified large-scale outcomes would close the Agreena gap
8	Rize	17K farmers, 50K+ hectares and roughly 10x growth in two years	Needs to prove it can scale its rice model across Southeast Asia
9	EarthOptics	One of the strongest soil measurement and predictive agronomy platforms	Farmer adoption of its combined data products now matters more than technology breadth
10	Loam Bio	Distinctive microbial technology for building stable soil carbon	Large commercial acreage and independent field evidence could push Loam much higher

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest regenerative agriculture market report.

Who is the author of this content?

NEW MARKET PITCH TEAM

We track new markets so founders and investors can move faster

We build living "market pitch" documents for emerging markets: AI, synthetic biology, new proteins, and more. Instead of outdated PDFs or hallucinated LLM answers, our clients get a clean, visual, always-updated view of what's really happening: key players, deals, regulations, and signals that matter. Learn more about us.