Ambrook raises $26.1M Series A led by Thrive Capital to bring financial software to American family farms

performance this show. I would have guessed 99. I thought you were locked in. I think you've done I think you've done fantastically this show. I I I like need to hire a new head coach. I'm going to like have a call. Whoa. We We got to have Brian Johnson back on the show. He He's down to come in the studio.

He can give us a coach. We'll bring Andrew Huberman back, too. He was Andrew Huber was saying there's a drug that can help you sleep better. Something like that. I might need to get on peeds to to actually beat you.

But then we're going to have to drug test because if you're if you're cheating and I'm and I'm natty sleeping, this is not going to fly. We sleep. We focus on our sleep to make the show better. We should be able to do any type of And there's no better There's no better place to sleep than a wander.

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We have our next guest in the studio. I'm gonna let you take the intro. Coming in from Ambrook announcing some news. What's going on? Welcome to the studio. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Uh quick intro on yourself and the company and then let's get into the news. Okay, sweet. So, I'm McKenzie.

I'm the CEO, uh one of the co-founders of Ambrook. Our mission is to help American family-run businesses become more profitable and resilient. And uh yeah, the way that we do that is we're starting in agriculture. So building out financial management software. So accounting like the full bundle.

So accounting, payments, um banking, cards for America's farmers and ranchers. How did you land on this idea? Where did it where did it all start? Yeah, it was a pretty winding path, but we actually started during the pandemic helping a lot of producers try to get access to working capital.

Um, and if you talk to a lot of producers about their problems and sort of what, you know, they think software can help with, it almost always has to do with the all the way up the Mazda hierarchy. So, you know, getting access to capital to take more risk.

Um, but the more that we dug into it, we helped we helped um a couple thousand producers access a couple million uh during during the pandemic, but when you really dig into it, uh it's just kind of it kind of gets down to like accounting and financial recordkeeping.

Like it's just accounting all the way down non-existent was one of the issues. you're like trying to underwite a business, but there's they're like, "Well, I have this piece of paper and I have this piece of paper and and you know, maybe they have a it's a huge range, like you can imagine.

" Um, but a lot of um, you know, you have farmers that are running multi-million dollar businesses on pen and paper. Um, and of course you have folks who are also, um, using, you know, standard F&B accounting software, too. Um, but a real the real issue is just that farming is actually so complicated.

Like, you know, I don't know if you guys have ever been on a dairy or how to do or how to do FD. I don't know if you guys have ever farmed. Not a lot of content farming. Content farming. Uh, no. I I I grew up in I grew up in the country in wine country, so I had some exposure.

I also have some portfolio companies that that have some end farms as customers. So I feel like I've had some exposure but certainly not an expert.

But from from my understanding I think that the challenge is one you're you're actually on a farm and historically some farm you know maybe I'm sure there's a lot of like Starlink adoption which maybe is a is a catalyst farmers about but at the same time you're not at a desktop computer.

So mobile mobile the explosion of mobile helped in farming because you could be updating a database or even sending an email.

Um, but all that is like relatively new and and I and I don't think the like big accounting software providers of the world were necessarily like actually on the ground talking with farmers being like what software do you want to run your business? Totally. Yeah.

We we ended up so a lot of accounting and FPNA software is built for for like office workers. So it's built as if they assume that you're going to be in an office, you know, eight hours a day. And um we actually ended up flipping that very early on.

and building workflows that were built for folks who spend more time in the field than in the office. And so um from the very beginning we had like crossplatform across mobile and uh and desktop like sort of web- based.

Um, but over 50% of our users use the mobile app as their primary device to do pretty complex bookkeeping, accounting, payments, uh, receipt management and uh, you know, understanding their their analytics and reports and and I think that speaks to kind of what you were talking about there.

How consolidated is the industry? I feel like there's this narrative of like private equity is rolled up every farm and there's like a few mega farms and the certain like billionaires own all the farmland in America.

But then at the same time it sounds it seems like there's still like I personally know folks who have family farms that are still in this like single digit million maybe tens of millions of dollars business like they're definitely SM there's there's a little under two million farms in the US and only uh only only something like 12 to 16,000 of them do more than 5 million a year an annual very long tail.

Yeah. Okay. So super long tail. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean that Yeah. That's the market opportunity for you. talk talk about the the new financing you guys announced today and maybe what was the inflection point that you that that made this round kind of possible. Yeah, totally. So, uh we just announced uh 26 uh.

1 million series A. Let's go. Who's it from? Uh so it's led by uh Josh at Thrive and Dentures. Congratulations. He's on a tear today. He got a trade deal done. He got he got It's been a busy busy day for for busy day for Thrive. All three of you. So yeah, busy deal for Dylan, too.

Um yeah, I don't even think you you caught this, but they they released S1 just like an hour ago. That's right. Yeah. Um more breaking news, but but anyways, back to Ambrook. No. Yeah. Um no, super.

Uh yeah, I just I so the inflection the inflection point for us was that we just that you know I think once we realized that we actually did need to I mentioned earlier that we at first were just trying to solve this paperwork problem uh with getting access to working capital and once we realized we actually had to just rebuild QuickBooks from the ground up that that is not that is a long build non-trivial so non-trivial uh and so we ended up sitting with a group of pilot customers a couple dozen farms across the US for about two and a half years before we ended up releasing it uh and actually starting to market it more to the public.

And so it wasn't until last year that we uh that we um launched and early last year and that that growth basically catalyzed uh catalyze this round. So that's awesome.

And and will is the goal for working capital to still be a core part of the business in the long run, but you just had to solve the underlying kind of ledger first? Yeah, totally.

And actually, I was I was the what pushed me to this decision too was just I ended up talking to a lot of these act big act players uh that a lot of the executives there that were uh doing a lot of a financing and I asked them whether or not they could standardize it by pulling on QuickBooks and they just said it was a garbage garbage in garbage out.

um problem and so they couldn't even like they weren't they themselves were going in and doing pretty specialized underwriting uh that was oneoff basically per operation.

I figured if we were going to have any shot at getting a lot of these folks our customers access to uh not just commod you know commoditized financing because a lot of these a lot of a bankers actually drive to the farm to put together boots on the ground boots. We need boots on the ground. Yep. Makes sense. Yeah.

which is I mean the faith-based relationships are really important but what that also what the cost is that it means that more capital can't flow into this ecosystem right and you it's really a lot harder to to do really interesting niche financing as well if you don't have that level of standardization and so a lot of what Ambro has been focused on is first just solving producers problems so making easier to file taxes making easier to manage receipts but now what we're starting to do is a lot of our producers for example are for the first time understanding their managerial cost in real time and able to make a decision like one of our producers, you know, realized that actually replacing heers was a much more profitable enterprise than his hay enterprise and being able to make those decisions in real time and either, you know, just be but because hay equipment is pretty expensive.

And so he basically he needed to increase the amount of um income that was flowing through the hay enterprise to to offset the cost or essentially, you know, stop growing his own hay and instead buy it.

And like those are the types of decisions that actually in real time affect profitability in a long run and build a more resilient operation. And that's just not something that again it's you know these farms are pretty complex.

It's one of the only industries where uh oftent times for manufacturing you're usually assembling things. Actually with agriculture you're disassembling it. So like what are the cogs on that?

Yeah, I it's exciting because to me it's like you can level the playing field and like if you're a farm and you don't have access to capital in the way that these big, you know, sort of, you know, mega corporations have like really efficiently run businesses, plenty of access to capital because they're running sophisticated financial operations.

is just so much harder to compete and and uh with a business like farming where I think a lot of you know there's a bunch of different subcategories but so much of the revenue comes in waves seasonally based on harvests and things like that and so it's if you're getting paid a couple times a year and you can't really have consistent access to capital.

It's like very challenging to actually run a business and stay in business and not be forced to just sell your land or or or do something else.

So it's very yeah totally there's I mean and there's a huge the big trend that everyone talks about in a is just the generational transition right like 70% of land is supposed to change hands in the next 15 you know 10 15 years the average age of a farmer in the United States is 57 58 it's only increasing right and so a lot of these operations are looking at generational transitions and there's a knowledge gap there as well because if everything is in you know if everyone's in someone's head about how all the finances work and how the operation runs, right?

Like that's fine, but what happens when you know what happens when you need to pass on to the next generation? Uh, and so a lot of what we think about is democratizing access to that knowledge. Um, democratizing access to capital, to knowledge, right?

I think this is also our thesis on AI, which is AI should actually be the great, you know, it should be actually the like the um democratizing wave that the computing revolution promised, but ended up just actually hollowing out the middle class.

I think you're actually seeing that come back in a real way where you're able to tap in. You know, folks who don't necessarily have, you know, specialized skill sets or like have a, you know, are a CPA or something can actually understand more about their books in real time.

You don't need to necessarily have that yeah background. You can get at least access to the intelligence of the average Mckenzie associate, but for but for you know the cost of Amber, you know, you don't you don't have to go hire McKenzie. So that's great. Yeah, awesome. Well, super exciting.

Thanks for coming on the show and uh come back on when you have news. Yeah, congratulations. Much like we'll talk to you soon. Awesome. The uh breaking news of course is that Figma has filed publicly filed their S1 with the SEC today on the printer. Oh, is the printer's going okay to list on the Oh, don't don't touch.

There we go. Boom. Uh they have applied to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol fig. Love it. It's got a great ticker fig. Congratulations. The New York Stock Exchange. One of the best stock exchanges if you ask me. Preliminary. I said I said gone. Uh John, I I called you gone. John John Gonk.

Um anyways, the other interesting data point Arfer Rock called this out. There's 70 million held in Bitcoin ETFs on the balance sheet with board approval for another 30 million BTC purchase via USDC. Whoa. Dylan, a little bit of a BTC treasury action going on. Wild. Um, what else? Would not have expected that.

He just sat. Bill McDermott uh who was formerly at Xerox transformed SAP uh and is now leading service now is joining Figma's board of directors. Congratulations. Bill is a legend in addition to his wisdom. I especially appreciate his humility and authenticity.

So great addition to Figma's board and well you're heading to the New York Stock Exchange. You got to get a watch on bezel. Go to getbbezzle. com. your bezel is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Uh yes, this is very good news. Um should we run through some timeline?

Get out of here. What do you think? Some timeline. Uh we got another trade deal, another massive trade deal. Jeff Burkovichi is joining the Wall Street Journal. Starting July 28th, he'll be heading up Wall Street Journal's San Francisco team as deputy tech and media e editor. Absolutely massive news.

Congratulations to Jeff on the trade deal. We had another trade deal that we posted on the timeline. Uh Sam is moving to Thrive Holdings to build exceptional businesses designed to compound over many decades. Massive signing from Thrive, our friends over at Thrive.

I mean, we're hearing the rumors maxed out probably four years. Guessing a one-year cliff, but we'll wait for more details. A veteran of RAMP, an absolute dog. Congratulations, Sam. And in other news, Public, our sponsor, has the IRA triple play here. 1% match plus 1% BL match plus 1% match. That's 3%.

So go check it out at public. com. The absolute dogs over at public do it again. Yes. Uh Will Manitis has uh a new law. New law alert. We got a new law. Oh, he's coining. He's coining. He's coining. Citadel's law. Any industry with sufficiently high stakes will end up mirroring the culture of hedge funds.

Massive cash comp for top performers, bida away dynamics where entire teams walk together, extreme litigation of non-competes, hardo work 247 culture, short 10 years. We are at most six months away from PE style midnight recruiting coming to AI.

at most 12 months away from undergraduates pre-ining for the job they want after a two-year stint at a frontier lab because before because they even start. There's a scrambling now Hawaii sagoponic parade here.

Uh it's fun to be a ghast when Bali or whoever pays hundred million to bring some PM uh an unknown quantity of their loyalists. That's portfolio manager, not my favorite is when portfolio managers have their their squad. No, no, no. On the the LinkedIn gap where they'll add like I'm gardening.

It's like gardening for months. Legally couldn't go work at another uh at another hedge fund. Uh after a six-month cool down, of course, over uh but this is actually much pure expression of the kind of thing that is being attempted in the Wong FB Nikita Z deal.

But this is actually much pure expression uh at this at the margin I think makes the capital environment for funding independent big AI things much worse. Not worth underwriting a team if you know they can do R&D on your dollar and then walk.

In the same way, my sense is fund staking terms got worse, not better postpod shop. He's getting in the weeds there, but it's a fun fun post. Cut.

But yeah, but this is the long-term impact of the AI telling I I do think it's accurate to say that, you know, a lot of people over the last 24 hours have been saying, "Oh, nerds are being treated like athletes. " I would just say this is tech is this is AI researchers being treated like PMs in in the hedge fund world.

Yep. Totally. So, um and the last piece of uh breaking news, I think you mentioned this briefly yesterday, but Andrew and Horowits is back in the mix to acquire Tik Tok joining Oracle and Blackstone in talks to buy the United States business. That'd be fantastic. I would love to see that. Be great.

Well, would be absolutely fantastic. End of the show, folks. Please leave us fivestar review on Apple Podcast and Spotify. And stay tuned for tomorrow's show. If you leave a review on Apple Podcast, we will read it on the show. You can put anything you want in there. You can put an ad for your business. Yes.

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