Picketa Closes an Oversubscribed $2.1M Round as Fertilizer Costs Bite

Picketa Systems has closed an oversubscribed $2.1-million round, announced last month, to expand its real-time crop nutrition platform across North America — the largest raise yet for the Fredericton agtech company we've been covering since its student-venture days.

The round

Returning investor Tall Grass Ventures led, joined by new backers BDC Seed Fund, Verdex Capital, and Skull Diamond and Heart Capital, with returning support from NBIF, Koan Capital, and East Valley Ventures. Together with a previously undisclosed $700,000 seed extension, the round brings Picketa's total funding to roughly $4.6 million.

That investor list tells its own story: the province's earliest believers — the student fund, NBIF, East Valley — are still on the cap table, now alongside a federal seed fund and specialist agtech money from Western Canada.

The product math

Per Picketa's announcement, the company's LENS platform reads a crop's macro- and micronutrient status from leaf tissue in under a minute, in the field — no lab, no waiting weeks while the growing season moves on. The platform now supports potatoes, corn, canola, soybeans, and wheat, with soybeans and wheat the newest additions. Together those crops account for over 70% of North American crop acres, the company says.

The timing does the selling. With fertilizer costs up sharply — the company cites a 49% rise — growers can't afford to feed fields on guesswork, and precision nutrition converts directly into saved input dollars.

Why this round matters here

We wrote in our 2024 review that NB agtech needed a post-Resson flagship, and in February 2025 that the province's problem was the "missing middle" of scaling capital. An oversubscribed round with national and Western Canadian funds buying into a UNB-born company is exactly what progress on both fronts looks like. The next milestone to watch: whether LENS's acreage math turns into the Series A this ecosystem hasn't produced in years.

Sources

• With Fertilizer Up 49%, Picketa Systems Closes an Oversubscribed $2.1M Round — company announcement (investors, crop coverage, fertilizer claim)
• Picketa Systems Closes $2.1M Round — Entrevestor coverage