ClearCost, a Canadian start-up that lets farmers track fertilizer prices and shipments in real time and contract physical deliveries, has closed a Series A funding round of an undisclosed size, backed by SaskWorks Venture Fund and Motiv Ventures, founder and chief executive Keith Busch told AgNavigator.
Founded in 2024, the platform is free for farmers, while ClearCost owns the data on transactions and logistics. Over the past 18 months the company has registered as a payment service provider and money service business in Canada, with partnerships to do the same in the US, and it plans to relaunch a redesigned platform continent-wide early next year. "Ag is a low-margin, high-volume industry. You can't apply consumer metrics to it and charge people 3% to process payments for a fertilizer that makes 5%," Busch said.
He said the cost of fertilizer and the risk farms are carrying are at levels one veteran dealer told him he had not seen "since the '80s." By his estimate, 25 to 30% of the world's nitrogen supply is blocked by the conflict involving Iran, and prices should fall once the region stabilises and more nitrogen reaches the market.
Phosphorus is a different story, Busch said, because sulfur, a by-product of petroleum used to make it, is scarce: each ton of phosphorus needs 0.4 tons of sulfur. "The forecasts we've seen are that the global phosphorus market is going to produce 55-60% of its annual average output this year," he said.
Fertilizer prices matter in South Asia too, where Bangladesh and India import much of their phosphate fertilizer; a global shortfall in phosphorus output would be felt in import bills.
Photo: Suyash Dwivedi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: AgNavigator
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