TLT East Ventures Joins Picketa's Backers as LENS Reaches More Growers

Picketa Systems has added another Atlantic Canadian backer. TLT East Ventures, a Saint John venture firm, has joined the Fredericton agtech's investor syndicate alongside NBIF, East Valley Ventures, Tall Grass Ventures and BDC, as the company scales its real-time crop-nutrition platform to more growers.

The new backer

TLT East Ventures describes its thesis as compounding Atlantic Canada's structural advantages into global market leadership, and it is putting that to work here. Picketa co-founder Xavier Hébert-Couturier thanked the firm's Michael Brown for "betting on Picketa," pointing to TLT's "deep farming roots right here in New Brunswick."

The addition fills out a cap table that already spans the province's earliest believers — UNB's Fraser Student Venture Fund, NBIF and East Valley — plus Calgary agtech specialist Tall Grass and BDC. We covered the company's oversubscribed $2.1-million round in July and its earlier US expansion.

The product

Picketa's LENS is a handheld device that reads a crop's macro- and micronutrient status from fresh leaf tissue in minutes, in the field — no lab, no waiting weeks on a tissue test while the growing season moves. It reports 13 macro- and micronutrients on the spot, which converts directly into saved fertilizer dollars at a time when input prices are volatile.

Local follow-on money

Follow-on capital has been New Brunswick's "missing middle": the 2024 funding numbers put the gap between early provincial cheques and later rounds at the centre of the province's scaling problem. Here a Saint John fund is writing into a Fredericton company alongside national and Western Canadian investors. The next milestone is unchanged: whether LENS's acreage math turns into the Series A the ecosystem has been waiting for.

Sources

• TLT East Ventures on LinkedIn — announcement that it joined Picketa's syndicate alongside NBIF, East Valley Ventures, Tall Grass Ventures and BDC
• Picketa Systems — company site and LENS product detail