Everybody eats. It’s one of those fundamental truths I learned from “Sesame Street” in the 1970s.
Another is that most of what we eat comes out of the ground, unless it’s meat, in which case what it eats probably comes out of the ground.
Either way, that makes agriculture kind of a big deal everywhere in the world. So if you can develop a product that makes farming better, more efficient or less costly, you’re probably onto something, and that itself is sort of a big deal.
That’s kind of what the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is hoping happens to its latest investment, a company called Solum. AH is leading a $17 million Series B round of venture capital financing in the start-up, and general partner John O’Farrell is joining its board of directors. Existing investors including Khosla Ventures also participated.
So what does Solum (those are its founders pictured in the farm field to the right) do? O’Farrell put it in an interesting way in a blog post today. As his partner Marc Andreessen said recently, software is eating the world. O’Farrell says it might also help feed it.
