Tractor Zoom Announces $5 Million in Series A Funding

Oct 06, 2022

Tractor Zoom, a data company that helps people find and value farm equipment, announced Oct. 3 the completion of a $5 million dollar Series A funding round. The oversubscribed funding round, which was co-led by Builders VC of San Francisco, Calif., and Bienville Capital of New York, N.Y., will allow the company to make significant investments in product innovation and data science to continue connecting its users to the information they need to make more informed buying decisions.

Additional participation in the Series A funding round came from Next Level Ventures and Wintrust Ventures, as well as follow-on from existing investors Innova Memphis, HPA, ISA Ventures, Ag Ventures Alliance, and strategic angel investors.

Since receiving $3 million in funding in 2020, Tractor Zoom has added over 1,450 equipment suppliers to its marketing platform and grown its user base by 400%. Additionally, the data and insights Tractor Zoom provides to its users on heavy equipment is now powered by over $20 billion in equipment sales, a 14x increase from 2020.

Source : Farm Equipment

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids