Ambrook raises $30M Series B as it expands from 2,500 to 8,000 businesses across agriculture and beyond

Speaker 1: We love benchmarks. Maybe we'll be able to move the goalpost because I want super duper intelligence. I'm not settling for

Speaker 2: super intelligence. Well, let's not keep our next guest waiting too long.

Speaker 1: Yes. Let's bring in Mackenzie Burnett from Ambrook back on the show. Back. Welcome back to the show. Mackenzie, how are doing?

Speaker 5: Good. How are you guys doing?

Speaker 1: We're doing fantastic.

Speaker 2: Congratulations.

Speaker 1: Give us the news. What happened?

Speaker 5: So excited to announce that we just raised a $30,000,000 series e.

Speaker 2: Good. Great. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Monkey groom. What a great a great partner here. Jordy?

Speaker 2: I think it's been somewhere between six and twelve months

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Since the last time you're on the show. Maybe maybe on the on the shorter end. Talk about the progress. What have you what have you learned about the state of American agriculture? The state of the industry that you're operating in?

Speaker 1: Physical economy. Yeah. Have you narrowed the scope of the the go to market motion or has you actually broadened it?

Speaker 5: Yeah. So we so since we last chatted, we were when we last chatted, we were last summer around 2,500 businesses using Ambrooke. Now we have over 8,000 Wow. Businesses using Ambrooke. And a lot of them are in agriculture, but, actually, we raised the b in order to start to expand to other verticals in the real economy because we started to see a lot of natural adoption with we have over a thousand truckers on the platform, general contractors, property managers, nonprofits. Ag is super diverse, so a lot of those customers started pulling us into their side businesses or their neighbor's businesses or family members. So that that's a a big part of the focus.

Speaker 1: Customers excited about potentially not needing to work with, like, some behemoth legacy ERP system that might be less agile in the AI era versus maybe have a smaller solution now, but if you just look at the growth rate of the technology and your team and your product, they're going to be you're you're just going to naturally solve a lot of problems that come up over the next few years for them.

Speaker 5: Yeah. I think I think our customers are already seeing that Mhmm. Ambrick is a lot more tailored to the complexity of their operations. So there's kind of this messy middle that hasn't been venture backable for a long time, which is if you're a business that's too complex for QuickBooks or Spreadsheets, but you don't have the team or resources to onboard to a Sage or NetSuite. Yep. You know, I would say probably about we estimate about 25% to 30% of America, American small businesses kinda fall in that messy middle

Speaker 6: Mhmm.

Speaker 5: Where they're multi p and l, they have complex balance sheets, but they don't, you know I think there's a there is some talk on x about, like, building for finance teams of one. Mhmm. We're building for finance teams of zero.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 5: And, like, you know, that is bringing AI CFOs to folks who where we might actually be their first business software. Like, 50% of our customers are moving off a pen and paper. Mhmm.

Speaker 2: Wow.

Speaker 5: You know, what's need to build and and to help them leverage AI is is a pretty different way of building than if you're building for a professional desk worker.

Speaker 2: Okay. So historically, there was fintech companies that would make vertical solutions for things like construction and agriculture and trucking, and I'm sure you're now competing with some of these players. How much is AI allowing you guys as Ambroek to, like, go into these new verticals and create the specific features or workflows that are more relevant within these sub industries?

Speaker 5: Yeah. It's making it a lot easier to to come with the right context layer, I think, for what folks need. So you can think of I think Ambrick is not vertical SaaS. We're more vertical go to market. So under the hood, we are actually look a lot more like a a much more user friendly, not sweet or the stage. Yeah. 30% of our customers access Amrift exclusively via our mobile app. We definitely have, like, the best mobile app in the industry when it comes to accounting software because we had a bill for users that were not by their desk most of the time.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 5: Yeah. We kinda call it the task list economy. And and so there's a lot of workflows that we had to build for, but you can kind of think of the ERP, which we spent the past couple of years building as that, like, agentic context layer. Like, if you ever had to build agents, you know, the first thing you have to do is actually clean up all the underlying data. That's what we've done really well. And now we're building so that both that whole data layer is both human legible and agent legible, and those agents make it a lot easier to personalize or to otherwise, like, speak the language to someone's business even if the underlying components or primitives are actually quite similar industry to industry, which is why we've been able to expand so quickly without having to, like, build a lot of custom features for for these different verticals.

Speaker 2: What what is sentiment around AI for your what kind of, like how do they feel about AI generally? I noticed on the website you guys are not certainly not leading the here's the new hot tool that's gonna revolutionize your business with it with AI even though you're using it under the hood, I'm sure, a bunch of different ways. But how do they how do they feel about it? Do they feel like it's a a useful tool? Are they generally against it? What's what's your read?

Speaker 5: I think our customers are generally open to it. I think there's just a lot of really healthy skepticism about whether AI is actually useful, which is actually this you know, useful to them as a business owner, which is actually quite similar to the to the conversation I think is happening on x right now, which is which is you have some some folks that have been able to really, like, understand how to build, but it requires a lot of infrastructure to be able to get there. And our customers don't have teams of engineers to be able to, you know, build all the things that they need in order to actually build their first agents. They're not gonna be rolling their own, you know, agents on eve or something like that. So there's there's a lot of work that we're doing to kind of meet people where they are. But I actually have been talking to a lot of our customers just asking them about general sentiment toward AI, and there is just a broad openness. It is just a little bit

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's more like show me show me. Don't tell me.

Speaker 5: Yeah. Exactly. And there's a lot of things where I think if you I I I think if you build it right, they will come. But a lot of people don't know how to build it right, I would say.

Speaker 1: Totally. Parker Conrad, when he launched Rippling, had this idea of the compound startup, this idea that he had to build multiple products and not a single point solution. Do you like the term compound startup? Do you think it applies here? Do you think it's a relevant philosophy for the modern era?

Speaker 5: I think there's a lot of learnings in talking to, one, a lot of admiration for, like, Parker and the way that he thought about building

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: Building that company. I think talking to a lot of friends at Rippling, I think there are some learnings to take from that, and there are other learnings, which is in a compound startup, you end up seeing a lot of duplication of work Sure. Like, real.

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 5: So there is actually some inefficiency within the company itself. And so when we've been thinking about Ambrooke, I've been trying to take the elements of that that I think make a lot of sense, which is you you build a platform that can enable sort of an emergent ecosystem on top, and that ecosystem can either be opportunities within the company or it can be things that our customers are actually able to build themselves. So one thing we decided to do a lot earlier, I think, than a lot of other players in the space was just to was just to give our customers access to an external MCP.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: And so we have customers now that are rolling their own, like, with Lovable or Base 44 or something, rolling their own apps for, like, hunting bookings for, like, one of our Texas ranchers, for example.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: And then they're pulling in context from Ambrooke into that, and we're, you know, we're we're now letting people write back you know, we'll we'll be letting people write back into the itself.

Speaker 3: And I

Speaker 5: think that that's it it allows for a lot more creativity outside the company

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 5: Not just in But if you think of yourself as a really good platform Yeah. Then I think you can you can get some of the benefit a lot of the benefits of the compound startup.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. You said you're vertical in go to market. What is the playbook for entering a new market? Like, if you're saying we're going to go after hunting organizations or trucking Yeah. Organizations, are you just dialing in the targeted ads and the messaging? Or are you going to conferences and hiring a whole new sales team?

Speaker 2: He's booking the hunting trip. Yeah. Yeah. Guess.

Speaker 5: Some of the hunting trip's just for fun.

Speaker 2: Yeah. You're you're like, we're here for two days. Just let me tell you about Amber.

Speaker 1: Maybe that's it.

Speaker 5: Yeah. I know there's so the way that we've been finding this playbook is trying to work and replicate across these different verticals are, first, you have to do a lot of brand awareness. That's the push. Yeah. And that can be Facebook. Facebook is actually super it still has a lot of art left within non SaaS, non tech industries. So I'll look at brand awareness on Facebook. And then what you start to do is once you get enough of a a set of customers that are really happy, you start to do case studies. You then take those case studies, and you start to do build partnerships with local trade associations.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 5: And then you start getting third party credibility Mhmm. Rolling. We also go on a lot of really niche podcasts. This is not the only podcast we that I've also, you know, go on, like, the Wealthy Cowboy or Sure. Or, you know and that has been really effective. We and we also help our customers go on those. And so helps them with brand awareness. And then so you start to build it. And then you start to get word-of-mouth, and then you start to see the regional density kick in. So in the counties where we have more than one to 2% market penetration, our CAC is half of the counties where we have maybe 10 to 25 bps of market penetration. And so that spread is just social proof and word-of-mouth. So you you have to kick start the the flywheel going.

Speaker 1: Wait. How old is the company?

Speaker 5: So we started in 2020.

Speaker 1: Okay. Because this feels very this feels like a

Speaker 5: very mature

Speaker 1: operating philosophy. Yeah. Much more than six months in.

Speaker 5: Launched the product in 2024.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 5: So we spent a couple of years. We spent one or two years kinda figuring out what product we wanted to build Mhmm. And just keeping the team really lean. And then we spent two years just sitting in a private beta with a couple of dozen of design partners.

Speaker 1: Interesting. Interesting. Very cool. Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on progress.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Yeah. Good alpha. Yeah. Good alpha on go to market.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Like it. Lots of people taking notes. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Great

Speaker 5: to Have see

Speaker 1: a great weekend. We'll talk to

Speaker 2: you soon. Cheers.

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