Exclusive: Milk Moovement Targets Dairy Supply Chain With $3.1M Seed

Canada-based Milk Moovement is applying technology to the dairy industry to ensure milk gets into the right cups at the right time.

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Robert Forsythe and Jon King started the cloud-based dairy supply chain company in 2018 and developed a proprietary software that tracks milk shipments from producers to processing plants and provides real-time quality and quantity information along the supply chain to all parties involved.

The company has closed on $3.1 million in seed funding, led by Dynamo Ventures, alongside Bread & Butter Ventures, Matchstick Ventures and Better Food Ventures, as well as Richard Cargill. Milk Moovement previously raised $275,000 in pre-seed from accelerators, according to CEO Forsythe.

King, who spent a number of years working in the dairy supply chain, recalls always looking through paper datasets and carbon copies, as well as only sharing something with others along the supply chain if there was a problem or payment was needed.

“It could take 10 to 15 days to get everyone to agree on the problem before finding a solution,” he added. “Our goal is to supply intelligence across the supply chain. Have everyone in one shared data set so that you find out problems in real time, can agree on what is going on, and can use tools to solve them.”

Through this process, dairy cooperatives and processors are able to eliminate administrative time by up to 85 percent, Forsythe said.

The agriculture and food technology sector continues to attract more entrants and investor attention. Since 2015, investors have planted just over $27 billion of known funding into global companies focused on these spaces, according to Crunchbase data. Although total investments per year was creeping up, investments made in 2020 saw a massive increase to $8.1 billion, up 44 percent from 2019’s $5.6 billion.

Meanwhile, Milk Moovement will deploy the new funds in product and software development, international expansion and doubling the size of its team, Forsythe said. In addition to the funding, the company is opening a new office in Minneapolis and recently expanded into Australia.

“This round is interesting because it happened with the flywheel of sales happening,” he said. “We are talking to big U.S. players, and over the last six months we were getting our name out there. We will grow from 500 to more than 2,000 farms in three months.”

In the next year, the company plans to further develop its transportation and route optimization that will be a “mission critical” component to bolster other areas of Milk Moovement’s business, such as feed.

Bread & Butter Ventures General Partner Brett Brohl learned about Milk Moovement when the company came through the Techstars Farm to Fork Accelerator program that he leads. While looking at innovation in the supply chain, he saw Milk Moovement making the dairy industry and supply chain more effective and efficient.

“The founding team is incredible — they understand the space and have a solution that is significantly better; not a step change, it is leap change from anything existing today,” Brohl added. “The more people on it, the better it gets. There is a cool opportunity to grow, scale and make sure the entire ecosystem is well managed and run.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias