FoA 355: Tule Technologies Acquired by CropX with Tom Shapland and John Gates

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Tule Technologies: https://tule.ag/

CropX:

Today’s episode features Tom Shapland of Tule Technologies and John Gates of CropX. We have a great episode for you talking about Tule’s technology, Tom’s entrepreneurial journey, The decision on both sides for Cropx to acquire Tule, M&A in agtech and integration lesson, and the future of artificial intelligence in agtech. 

Tom is the co-founder and CEO of Tule Technologies, which is now part of CropX. As a graduate student at UC Davis, Tom developed the underlying technology that Tule commercialized which is a way to measure water use of crop plants over a broad area. Specifically they measure actual crop evapotranspiration or ET and he’ll talk a lot more about that. He founded Tule in 2013 after finishing his PhD work in this area. He went out and started talking to customers and getting sales early, which you’ll find is an important part of his entrepreneurial journey. Him and his co-founder Jeff LaBarge went the Y Combinator program, which is our second episode this month with a YC alum. 

Joining us from CropX is senior vice president and global head of product John Gates. John also has a background in academia. He was a professor of Hydrology at University of Nebraska. He evenutally joined CropMetrics as their Chief Scientist and stayed on with CropX after they acquired CropMetrics a few years ago. 

You’ll hear from Tom first about Tule’s technology and trajectory, and then we’ll invite John in to talk about the acquisition and much much more.