CSA Startup Farmigo Raises $16 Million in Series B, Moving From Gowanus to Bushwick

As the breeding ground for all things small-batch and locally produced, Brooklyn makes sense the home base for Farmigo, a startup that’s something like Seamless meets CSA. The company looks to be thriving, and it seems that both the Brooklyn consumer and venture investors see something in it too.

Farmigo announced Wednesday that they raised $16 million in Series B funding to expand their vision for connecting farmers with eaters. But the expansion is also physical — they’re planning to move this month from their Gowanus HQ into a new 8,800-square-foot space in Bushwick.

The company was launched in 2012 as a software solution for coordinating Community Supported Agriculture groups — folks who band together to buy produce directly from farmers and then split the harvest into separate shares. But soon after moving from San Francisco to Brooklyn in 2012, Farmigo’s Founder and CEO Benzi Ronen was inspired to scale the CSA concept.

What Seamless is to food delivery, Farmigo is to CSAs. Sure, you could sign up for a regular CSA share and pick up whatever the farm decided to send that week. Or you could use Farmigo’s site to order a variety of edibles from a number of different farms and pick it all up at a location near your home. Without needing to volunteer for a check-in shift. Or trek to one of Brooklyn’s major destination grocery stores.

A map of Farmigo pickup spots. Image via Farmigo

With dozens of pickup locations in Brooklyn, Farmigo is essentially a giant CSA group. Their innovation is in improving access and choice by rethinking the food-to-table supply chain.

This month, Farmigo is expanding to a new home base in Brooklyn — the ground floor of a Bushwick warehouse at 99 Scott Avenue, according to the Commercial Observer. Interesting side note: building owners Bushwack Capital have recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to overhaul 99 Scott Avenue into mixed-use retail and office space.

Including Series A funding, Farmigo has raised a total of $26,000,000 from lead investors Formation 8, Benchmark Capital and Sherbrooke Capital. And the company’s growth is promising: each month more than 15,000 households use the service and another 2,000 new households join, according to a recent TechCrunch article.

[Photo: The Bitten World via Flickr]

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