For much of agtech’s investment history, private equity (PE) has been a minor character. Venture capital built the sector, and strategic acquirers–OEMs, agchem majors, food companies –provided the (few and far between) exits.
PE has largely sat on the sidelines, deterred by long commercialization timelines, asset-light business models, and the difficulty of generating recurring revenue in a sector tied to weather and commodity cycles.
This contrasts sharply with sectors like software and healthcare, where PE is a structural fixture, involved in more than 60% of SaaS M&A transactions in 2024, according to Software Equity Group, and at least 1,000 healthcare transactions in the US that same year.
With a sparse agtech exit landscape and a tough fundraising environment, some VCs and entrepreneurs have pinned their hopes on more active PE involvement; the PE dynamic in agtech is shifting, but probably not as quickly as founders might hope.
Private equity transactions in agtech increased slightly in 2024, according to Verdant Partners’ 2025 Global Food and Agribusiness M&A Review. PE participation in agtech remains selective because many categories still need more scale, recurring revenue, and operating leverage before becoming attractive targets. The firm describes 2025 agtech investment as driven by “pragmatic digitalization:” solutions with fast, measurable ROI that slot into existing farm workflows.
Verdant observed over 60 M&A deals within the agriculture technology segment in 2025, of which less than 10% involved a direct or PE-backed buyer. A majority of transactions were valued at less than $10 million, many of which were non-cash equity transactions. Deal volume was up slightly from 2024, but the percentage of completed transactions involving a financial buyer remained unchanged.
Blake Croegaert, a partner at Verdant, is direct about why the PE roll-up model has stalled in agtech: “A number of PE acquisitions in the sector have been made by firms with long-term buy and hold strategies,” he tells AgFunderNews.
“PE groups acquiring and integrating multiple technology platforms with sale strategies, especially pureplay software businesses, have yet to demonstrate secondary exits with success, an outcome that would likely bring in additional PE capital to duplicate the strategies. Despite a few promising examples of PE roll-ups, there’s been attempted sales of some of those platforms that haven’t finalized.”
“Until somebody successfully demonstrates that roll-ups, or companies on a standalone basis, become more profitable and demonstrate higher ROI for financial investors and owners, I don’t think you’re going to see private equity capital come in more aggressively than has been the case the past few years to start buying these venture-backed companies,” he adds.
The structural problem, he argues, is that profitable agtech companies are simply rare. “Private equity will continue to prioritize strong financial performance and are less likely to make acquisitions of pre-profitable, slower-growth businesses. The field of profitable, especially venture-backed companies, is low, and most of them have not hit the requirements of private equity yet.”
The deals that did close in 2025 illustrate what does clear the bar.
KKR and Highland’s growth investment in Smaxtec, a dairy health-monitoring company, is cited by Verdant as an indication of where PE sees value: proven health and yield calculations per animal, multi-year contracts, low churn, and expansion revenue.
KKR also acquired TopCon via a management buyout, showing an appetite for established precision ag infrastructure with defensible market positions and proven commercial traction.
Sara Olson, senior director of agriculture venture investments at Bayer’s CVC put it plainly last March: “There isn’t much appetite among ag majors for large-scale M&A, but PE firms are hunting for businesses with attractive margins and growth potential,” she said ahead of World AgriTech USA. “Startups showing sustained growth through 2023 and 2024 are best positioned for these transactions.”
The capital trap
The deeper problem beyond PE selectivity that Croegaert identifies is a system-wide seizure. “You’ve got this natural capital blood that doesn’t exist,” he says. “No funding rounds because the valuations don’t support it; no exit options.”
The root cause, in his view, is valuation overhang built up during the investment boom. “Historic valuations for seed, Series A and B rounds were routinely too high from 2016 to 2023, and buyers over time have demonstrated they weren’t willing to pay the valuations that investors were placing on these companies. The misalignment between what a strategic is willing to pay versus what capital went in at has been a key driver for why you’re not seeing a lot of positive exits.”
While low farm incomes and softer agribusiness markets have certainly suppressed strategic buyer appetite of late, Croegaert hints at a more structural issue: the decade of inflated entry valuations that created a gap many buyers are unwilling to close.
Biologicals: the integrators are winning
Biologicals–microbials, biostimulants, biocontrols and related crop protection technologies–represent one of the clearer and more successful entry points for private equity as well as strategic buyers. In his agtech exit deepdive last year, Michael Lee at Syngenta Ventures noted that PE exits in agtech have historically concentrated in biologicals and inputs more than in digital or autonomy categories. And while Croegaert expects to see more biologicals deals over the next year, he notes the category has softened somewhat with general inputs market pressure.
In 2025, the following biologicals deals closed:
Syngenta acquired Intrinsyx Bio for nutrient-use efficiency; Gowan Company acquired Ceradis, a biopesticide innovator, to strengthen its crop protection offering across Europe and the Americas; Lavie Bio, in its fourth acquisition in a year, bought ICL Growing Solutions to expand its microbiome-based platform; and PE firm Ambienta took a stake in Agronova as a sustainability-focused portfolio move.
The pattern across these deals is consistent: buyers are not chasing pure inventors.
Writing in Verdant’s report, agronomist-turned-ag researcher and advisor Shane Thomas of Upstream Ag Insights argues that biologicals integrators have the competitive advantage over the pure inventors. The companies commanding attention are those that can assemble existing biology, chemistry, and technology into complete, farmer-ready solutions. A novel microbe in isolation is worth less than a company that can combine it with compatible chemistry, deliver it reliably through existing distribution, and document ROI across multiple crop systems.
Croegaert also flags animal agriculture as an emerging M&A pocket that has historically lagged crop ag in deal activity.
“Animal health, nutrition, technology in and around imagery, analytics, processing seems to be an emerging trend that’s getting some good uptake,” he says. This segment is worth watching with its commercial maturity curve in animal ag running a few years behind precision crop tech, meaning the consolidation phase may be earlier and the entry points more attractive.
Below the PE tier: equity swaps and minority stakes
Not every exit is a clean strategic acquisition or PE buyout. Croegaert describes two interim mechanisms that have become more common as the primary exit market has tightened.
The first is minority strategic acquisitions and investments with tech development or marketing arrangements, such as exclusive licenses, often with additional purchase options at a later date. The model Verdant ran for Pessl Instruments, in which Lindsay Corporation acquired a minority position and secured the option to acquire the remaining stake later. “It gives the strategic a partnership and access to critical innovation without full reporting obligations, and gives the target company a credible path to full acquisition while allowing investors to find liquidity without forcing all owners and stakeholders to exit before the company reaches higher potential and stronger valuation conversation.”
The second is consolidation via equity, in which technology companies use their own equity rather than cash to acquire smaller players. Croegaert cites CropX as an example of a company that has built this into a deliberate strategy, but there are many more cases across the industry.
“They say to their targets, ‘you’re not getting the market penetration you want, but with your technology, we could scale faster, so let’s double down together with you coming on to our equity ownership instead of getting cash. We grow together and the company’s worth more with greater scale, and you’ll get your liquidity in the future.”
He describes this as “a pretty common fallback for a lot of early-stage companies that don’t have the ability to bring capital on and aren’t quite ready to sell to a strategic or financial buyer.”
Neither mechanism is a full exit. But for VC-backed companies caught between an unreachable valuation and a strategic market that isn’t buying, they are real interim options and increasingly the realistic near-term outcome for companies that cannot yet clear the bar for PE or strategic acquisition.
The exit window is M&A only
The broader exit picture is stark. Of the 39 agtech exits recorded across the first three quarters of 2025, every single one was via M&A. None via IPO. The public market route has effectively closed. The number of public agtech companies peaked at 15 with a combined valuation of around $34 billion; the entire value of public agtech stocks now sits around $1 billion, a 97% decline from peak, according to Lee’s analysis.
Trade sales to OEMs and agchem majors have been the primary exit mechanism for almost 20 years. Lee’s analysis shows the median price in the top 10 exits sits at $400 million, though that figure covers only the top 10 transactions, and the dataset has acknowledged gaps.
Lee argues that the acquisition rate correlates with corn prices, rising sharply when prices exceed $6 per bushel. The current depressed commodity environment is a headwind for exits, not just for investment. Croegaert expects 2024 and 2025 to prove the trough years, with a lag-effect recovery in strategic buyer appetite building through 2026 and into 2027 as farm gate profitability improves. He also states that the early-stage companies are focusing on profitability and on their core competencies.
“PE interest remains high for technology companies, and we’re seeing business performance improve and reach the state where financial buyers will become a more realistic exit option in the coming years, a positive relief for investors and a welcome theme for strategic buyers that are keen to acquire strong, proven technology businesses.”
What the bar actually looks like
For founders and VC investors, the practical implication is uncomfortable but clear. PE is not a soft landing for companies that couldn’t attract a strategic acquirer, however, it is an increasingly active capital source for a narrow category of mature, recurring-revenue businesses with proven unit economics in both digital agtech and biologicals.
Verdant provides an exit readiness checklist that’s specific: proof of repeatable ROI, validated unit economics, case studies by segment, a credible path to breakeven, defensible IP, a clean API layer or formulation platform, and a proprietary dataset or biological asset. The summary the report offers is worth treating as a strategy document: do one thing well, scale it, and make it easy to connect to the rest of the ecosystem.
For biologicals companies specifically, that ecosystem connection now means demonstrating interoperability with chemistry, not just standalone efficacy. For digital agtech companies, it means OEM integration readiness built in from the start, not retrofitted before a sale process. And for both, it means arriving at the table already profitable, or close enough that a buyer can see the path clearly.
Download Verdant’s report here.
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