Today, Texas-based GrainChain announced a $29 million funding round. This includes $10 million from Overstock, which provided the GrainChain Series A and B funding through Medici Ventures. The Medici fund is now managed on Overstock’s behalf by Pelion Venture Partners, which committed another $10 million of its own funds. Brigham Young University’s Cougar Capital was one of the other participants in the funding.

GrainChain offers a suite of solutions for farmers and buyers, most of which are based on blockchain and smart contracts. That includes data tracking from seed to harvest, inventory management, logistics, and transaction management.

“2022 was a breakthrough year for GrainChain in many ways,” said GrainChain CEO and co-founder Luis Macias. “We saw explosive growth as our transaction platform, Trumodity, fully integrated with banking systems in Latin America and as we launched liquidity programs with coffee farmers in Mexico and Central America.”

Many of its tens of thousands of users are small farmers in the US or Latin America. They do not have any technological infrastructure, so the GrainChain system automates the collection of data through IoT and mobile applications that can work offline.

GrainChain is essentially a data collection system. Farmers are incentivized to collect data if they know they can receive more money, for example by demonstrating that the commodity is sustainably sourced.

But once the data is there, it reduces the risks for the bankers who might lend to the farmer or the insurers that provide coverage. One of the visions driving GrainChain is to enable farmers to get a loan or insurance in minutes.

Brian Humphreys, president of Rio Bank, a local Texas bank where farmers use GrainChain, commented that “farmers just want a guarantee that they are going to get paid. Period. “

Farmers are not waiting 60 days after delivering the grain to the silos to receive payment. Either the payment is immediate or the payment date is automated through smart contracts.

Having seen the real-world use of cans in action with GrainChain, Humphreys believes that blockchain will hit banking sooner rather than later.

GrainChain is not alone in deploying blockchain in agriculture. Ripe.io provides a traceability solution and Agrotoken tokenizes commodities in South America. The really big player is Covantis, a consortium backed by seven of the world’s biggest agribusinesses, including Cargill, Bunge and ADM.