Why We Invested in Verdi

One would think agricultural water use would be ripe for innovation. It accounts for 70% of the world’s freshwater withdrawals, and many global crops are grown in arid regions. However, despite the fact that the world will need to feed more people with less water, ag irrigation has been a tough market for startups. In our view, the right company needs to solve three distinct problems. First, water is cheap, so growers have little economic incentive to cut down on use. Second, growers have a notoriously long and skeptical technology-buying cycle. And third, the offering has to solve a pain point acute enough to overcome the first two. It’s a tough market, and we have been patiently waiting for an investment directly in the ag irrigation market since Burnt Island Ventures launched Fund I in 2021. In 2026, we finally found one.

Verdi, founded by Arthur Chen and Roman Kozak, has managed to solve all of those problems and then some. Verdi is building physical AI for farms - a retrofit hardware and software platform that acts like SCADA, the industrial control systems that run factories and utilities. It layers monitoring, automation, and remote control over a grower's existing irrigation and fertigation infrastructure, cutting irrigation labor by up to 90% and water use by up to 70%. For agribusinesses, where margin improvements are typically measured in the single digits, this is meaningful stuff. 

Solving the Incentive Question

Water is a major input in irrigated agriculture, but unlike things like labor and fertilizer, it often does not factor heavily into a farm’s costs. Making the economic argument for something as important as conserving water has historically been a challenge. Verdi’s approach is to follow the farm’s priorities: they quantify their value in labor savings, not water savings. The US farm labor crisis is persistent and growing: roughly 70% of the country’s crop workers are foreign-born, and with intensified immigration enforcement over the last few years, the sector’s core workforce is both shrinking and aging. This has left many farms with real labor gaps and few alternatives. Operating and maintaining aging irrigation infrastructure eats up 30-40% of a laborer's day, and this is exactly the time Verdi gives back: automated valves, remote monitoring, and remote pump control cut irrigation labor by up to 90%. The same crew can do more valuable work, or the farm can run leaner. Either way the grower wins. And unlike technology sold on yield improvements, customers see the ROI from day one rather than waiting a full season to feel the economic win.

Hacking the Adoption Cycle

Convincing anyone to change their behavior is tough. Convincing growers, who have been sold plenty of expensive and ultimately useless equipment over the years, is another level entirely. These are people who have been burned before by the latest Silicon Valley darling, and are understandably wary of shelling out for the next new thing. That’s why it mattered so much to us that this team came with serious agricultural pedigree (not one, but two farming families) and had dirt on their boots from real time in the field. It was a good sign from a reference that Arthur often takes calls from a truck parked up in a grower's field. It also mattered that they can build a company, not just a product. They have been thoughtful about pricing strategy, pivoted the go-to-market model when needed, and compressed the sales cycle from months to weeks. And co-founder Roman was an early engineer at two startups that were later acquired by SpaceX and Apple, bringing deep experience building frontier hardware from the earliest stages. This is not his first rodeo. The early customer evidence backed all of this up. One customer expanded their deployment 40x in five months. They have near-zero churn, with only a single customer lost in the company's history. Retention combined with rapid expansion is a very helpful dynamic indeed.

Focused Beachhead, Big Expansion Potential

The vast majority of crops in the United States rely on rainfall - only about 15% of US acreage is actually irrigated. But that 15% punches above its weight, because it includes most of the high-value specialty crops such as fruits, nuts, and wine grapes. These also happen to be the crops with the highest labor costs, where the ROI on automation can get really juicy. Verdi gets this, and has kept its focus deliberately tight on larger specialty-crop farms of roughly 1,000-10,000 acres. But this is just the start of the story. The long-term prize for Arthur and team is to become the operating system for farm infrastructure - stacking modules, expanding into adjacent equipment, and eventually reaching into pivot-irrigated row crops. This is exactly the pattern we like to see: a starting segment where pain is intense and the value is immediate and deeply felt, with a potential path to something much bigger.  

A Moat That Compounds

None of this would matter if incumbents could simply copy it, so we dug into why they can’t. Verdi's edge starts with a proprietary approach to connectivity that brings the cost of automation down roughly 10x, on hardware built to run for years untouched. And for just this reason, the incumbents in the space are structurally disincentivized to follow; a low-cost retrofit layer would cannibalize the premium, bespoke project economics they depend on. It just wouldn’t make sense for them. Even better yet, the company’s moat compounds. Once Verdi is installed, it becomes the system of record and control for an entire farm's water - the schedules and alerts the whole operation runs on. Every new acre then adds to a proprietary dataset that already spans some 1.2+ billion data points across 22,000acres. The flywheel running from ease of installation and ease of use, to immediate benefits, to ease of expansion is a very sticky system of record. The data is going exponential with expansion - and there are a lot of benefits downstream for the company and the customer.

Right Place, Right Time

The agricultural market has been a volatile place for start ups, where high prices and promise have given way to an early-stage slump time and again. But something has shifted over the past year or two: the arrival of AI and a growing recognition that the next generation of agriculture will require far more intelligence and automation in the field. Major agricultural equipment companies and global food brands alike are increasingly partnering with Verdi to bring these capabilities into real-world farm operations at scale. 

To us, that is validation of a much bigger opportunity. Verdi has the potential to become the operating layer for farm infrastructure: the system that connects existing equipment, operators, data, and increasingly intelligent automation across the farm. That is the foundation for a large and consequential company, and exactly the kind of platform we have been waiting to back.

We have spent five years looking for the right angle on water in agriculture and in Verdi, we have found it. We could not be more excited to be backing Arthur and Roman, and the whole team. Welcome to the Burnt Island.