Atman Capital, a venture firm with offices in New York, San Francisco and Miami, Fla., has joined a $3.7 million seed funding round for Permanent Agriculture.
The round was led by San Francisco-based Better Tomorrow Ventures. Other participants included Los Angeles-based Autopilot and Progression, Burlington, Vt.-based Gaingels, Seattle, Wash.-based Sugar Mountain and others.
Founded in 2023 by Wiley Webb, a Stanford University design graduate, Permanent is a public benefit company focused on “regenerative” agriculture. It manages over 2,000 acres of land producing varied crops, with 20 enterprise customers including health food restaurant chain Sweetgreen. Using a modern technology platform, Permanent also ships produce across the United States.
Atman, which backs startups in the United States and Latin America, was founded in 2021 by the Brazilian-born duo of Pedro Sorrentino and Pedro Dias. Sorrentino was initially a music journalist before turning to tech, entrepreneurship and then venture funding, initially at OneVC. Dias, who came to the United States when aged 11 years, spent eight years at JPMorgan, after working as a sales consultant at AT&T and Goldman Sachs-backed Riskified.
Autopilot is run by co-founders and managing partners Maximilian Friedrich and Will Summerlin. Both worked together at Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest. Earlier, Friedrich worked for Redstone, a Berlin-based venture capital firm, while Summerlin worked at the ride-hailing firm Lyft.
Progression was founded by J.J. Aguhob, a “3x founder, startup advisor, and executive who built products at Dapper Labs, Musical.ly / TikTok, Headspace, Viddy / Fullscreen, Ticketmaster and Xdrive / AOL,” according to the firm’s website.
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Permanent plans to use the new funds to expand its sales, supply and technology teams, and expand sale of produce to new regions.
“Today, the biggest challenge for farmers is selling more. Above all, they need to find buyers for their products,” J.C. Bahr-de Stefano of Better Tomorrow Ventures said in a LinkedIn post. Permanent acts as the intermediary farmers desperately need to aggregate supply, manage interactions and deliver optimal prices, he added.
“We think about scale and expansion through anchoring around our customer demand and unique needs, and creating both local and distance programs,” Webb told TechCrunch. “We are ultimately flexible to optimize around our customer needs for the most competitive delivered pricing, and that enables us to develop supply and de-commodify and differentiate items in the process.”
