Loamy Lands $6 Million Seed to Digitize the Food Supply Chain

Loamy Technologies Inc., a Playa Vista-based food supply chain management platform, raised $6 million in seed funding on Tuesday — bringing its total raised to $10 million since its 2024 founding.

Zeal Capital Partners led the round. Venice-based Amplify.LA, Supply Change Capital, and another unnamed Los Angeles-based venture firm also participated.

The company's founder and CEO, Charles Julius, built the idea during his time at Motive Technologies Inc., where he crafted and scaled industry-specific logistics strategies across the sectors the company served. One sector stood out for the wrong reasons.

"We had to build a cross-functional platform that served any industry with commercial vehicles, trucks, fuel equipment, and oil and gas. But the food and beverage sector was materially underserved versus the others," Julius said. "We saw the biggest companies still needing to use very complex spreadsheets, text messages, sticky notes, all sorts of non-digital ways of managing their core daily operations."

That gap became Loamy.

What is Loamy actually building?

Loamy wants to pull every part of the food supply chain — from growing crops to safely storing and shipping items — into one unified system.

That's harder than it sounds. Perishable food sits under strict oversight requirements, including traceability rules that let the federal government move quickly on produce recalls. Then there are the grocery stores, each handing farmers a spec sheet covering the color, size, and quality produce must meet before it reaches the shelf.

Weather can sink an entire season. A rainier-than-usual growing season, or a different fertilizer, can push a whole yield below spec.

"You grow for a long period of time, invest all this money and then the farmer looks to sell this product and they simply can't because it can't meet spec or the visual qualities and what the retailer requires," Julius said. "These types of food products often get thrown away."

Loamy's answer is predictive. The platform combines artificial intelligence, field and weather data, and satellite imagery to detect plant stress and forecast whether a yield will pass grocery standards. If the outlook is poor, farmers can redirect that produce to another buyer early — a juice manufacturer or a prepared foods processor, for example — instead of losing the crop entirely.

The pitch landed with Zeal Capital Partners. "Platforms that connect inventory, logistics, labor and finance have a significant opportunity to reshape how businesses operate," Nasir Qadree, founder and managing partner of Zeal Capital Partners, said in a statement.

Why does this round stand out?

Loamy is growing against a sector-wide wipeout. The startup has grown revenue 30 times year over year, according to the company — while most of its peers are gone.

Per PitchBook data, 57% of food and agriculture startups with known outcomes have outright shuttered, accounting for $8.2 billion in capital that never materialized.

"Companies locked into high fixed costs (plants, debt, specialized equipment) in categories where customers were either unwilling or unable to pay a meaningful premium for 'sustainable' or novel products," Alex Federick, an agri-foodtech analyst at PitchBook, said in an analyst note.

A McKinsey & Co. report adds another layer: farmers operating on razor-thin margins hesitate to invest in unproven products. And because the supply chain is fragmented and siloed, new technology often adds another step rather than streamlining the process.

How does Loamy win over skeptical farmers?

Julius argues the answer is speed and proof, not novelty.

"They don't necessarily chase technology for the sake of technology, they chase results," Julius said. "If you can actually offer them business value and prove it quickly and also deliver in a way that doesn't take months to get going and upsets the entire business operation, you can actually prove some real value."

That's the bet Zeal Capital Partners, Amplify.LA, and Supply Change Capital have now backed with $6 million: that a unified, AI-driven platform selling measurable results — not sustainability branding — can do what $8.2 billion worth of failed agri-foodtech capital couldn't.