The most valuable data in agriculture is often the hardest to get. It sits six inches underground, changes by the hour, and is a pain to collect. For decades, the standard practice has been the manual soil test: a farmer or agronomist drives a probe into the earth, bags a sample, and ships it to a lab. The results, when they come back weeks later, are a snapshot of a single point in time. Teralytic, a Manhattan-based agtech company founded in 2016, is betting that snapshot is no longer good enough.
The company sells a wireless, professional-grade soil probe packed with 26 sensors. It measures the usual suspects,NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium), pH, and moisture,but also tracks salinity, aeration, respiration, air temperature, light, and humidity, all at multiple depths [Teralytic.com]. The probes transmit data to a dashboard, aiming to give farmers a real-time, high-resolution picture of their soil health to optimize fertilizer and irrigation [Tomorrow Lab]. It’s a hardware-heavy bet on turning dirt into a continuous data stream.
The hardware wedge into regenerative ag
Precision agriculture tools often start with satellite imagery or weather stations. Teralytic starts in the ground. The premise is that subsurface conditions are the ultimate driver of yield and input efficiency, and that measuring them directly and constantly unlocks more value than inferring them from above. For a farmer moving toward data-driven or regenerative practices, the probe is pitched as the foundational sensor, replacing sporadic lab tests with 24/7 monitoring [Teralytic.com]. The business model is a classic hardware-plus-software play: each sensor reportedly costs around $100, with an additional per-acre charge for the platform [TheSpoon]. The company has raised a total of $6.8 million in seed funding to date [Prospeo, 2026].
A quiet build in a noisy field
The competitive landscape for soil sensing is crowded with well-funded players. Teralytic’s listed rivals include CropX, Arable, and FarmersEdge, each with its own approach to layering soil data into farm management systems. What’s notable about Teralytic is its low profile. News coverage in major tech or ag trade press is sparse, and the company lists no named customer deployments or partnerships. Public traction metrics are limited and dated, with one source citing $223,900 in revenue for 2021 [getlatka]. More recent estimates suggest annual revenue around $2 million [Prospeo, 2026]. The team is small, reported at 1-10 employees, and is led by CEO Trintus Smith, with Abha Mundepi serving as Director of Soil Science [Prospeo, 2026].
| Role | Name | Source |
|---|---|---|
| CEO | Trintus Smith | [Prospeo, 2026] |
| Director of Soil Science | Abha Mundepi | [Prospeo, 2026] |
| VP Engineering | Dan Casson | [Equilar] |
| VP, R&D-Soil Science | Ryan Mansergh | [TheCompanyCheck] |
The unit economics of dirt
For a hardware-centric climate bet like this, the math has to work in the field, not just on a datasheet. The value proposition hinges on the probe’s ability to save more money on inputs (like fertilizer and water) than it costs to deploy and operate. A back-of-the-envelope calculation: if a $100 sensor (plus service fees) helps a farmer cut nitrogen application by just 5% on a 500-acre cornfield, the savings could run into thousands of dollars per season, paying for the hardware quickly. The real test is whether the data is actionable enough to consistently drive those decisions at scale. Teralytic’s ultimate incumbent isn’t another startup’s sleek dashboard; it’s the entrenched habit of the manual soil test and the farmer’s own intuition. To win, its probes need to prove they are not just more informative, but more economically rational.
Sources
- [Teralytic.com] Teralytic | A Soil Health Company | https://teralytic.com
- [Tomorrow Lab] Teralytic Bringing IoT to Big Agriculture | https://www.tomorrow-lab.com/projects/teralytic
- [TheSpoon] Article on sensor pricing | https://thespoon.tech
- [Prospeo, 2026] Teralytic Overview, Address & Contact | https://prospeo.io/c/teralytic
- [getlatka] Teralytic revenue and team data | https://getlatka.com/companies/teralytic
- [Equilar] Executive profile for Dan Casson | https://equilar.com
- [TheCompanyCheck] Executive profile for Ryan Mansergh | https://thecompanycheck.com