Montréal and Boulder, Colorado-based Landjourney has rebranded to Sweet Technologies and closed $7.4 million USD ($10.3 million CAD) to expand the reach of its agriculture-focused lending software.
The news: Sweet announced the seed financing Monday. It was led by Montréal’s Diagram, San Francisco-based Builders VC, and Illinois’ Cooperative Ventures. The all-primary capital round, which consisted of a combination of equity funding and simple agreements for future equity, closed during the second quarter. Sweet plans to use it to expand the reach of its flagship FinTech platform, SweetAg, which aims to modernize how other financial institutions originate and service loans to farmers and agribusinesses using AI. Sweet co-founder and CPO Jeremie Bedard told BetaKit over email that the startup also intends to start serving firms doing other forms of commercial lending beyond agriculture.
From the source: As farms contend with soaring diesel and fertilizer costs thanks to global instability, farmers’ need for easy, speedy, and flexible loan options has increased, Sweet said in its news release. The company sees room to help agriculture lenders spend less time on paperwork and focus more of their efforts on managing client relationships better than legacy solutions. For his part, Bedard claimed in the release that SweetAg can help lenders complete previously “weeks-long processes” in “a matter of days.”
The context: Founded in 2024 by Bedard and CEO Luke Johnson, Sweet got its start focusing on agriculture loan origination and servicing, which Bedard called “one of the harder forms of commercial credit to digitize” given its complexity. Today, approximately $10 billion in loan volume runs through Sweet, which claims to work with some of the largest agricultural lenders and cooperatives in the US. With this funding, Sweet plans to move into serving banks, credit unions, and other firms that do complex commercial lending that is too specialized to fit neatly into legacy loan origination systems.
Final thought: Sweet was founded in Montréal, nine of its 12 employees—including its entire tech team, which it plans to grow—are located in Canada, and the company has had the capacity to serve Canadian clients from day one. But to date, like many other Canadian tech startups, the company has seen far greater pull for SweetAg from the US market, where it counts AgAmerica, CHS Capital, and Growmark among its customers. Bedard said he would love to see more Canadian financial institutions follow suit, and said this round gives it the capacity to support such conversations and implementations over the coming years.
Feature image courtesy Sweet Technologies.