Meet Sami Tellatin | COO and Founder

We had the good fortune of connecting with Sami Tellatin and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sami, can you talk to us a bit about the social impact of your business?
FarmRaise delivers financial software that helps farmers master their farm finances. This is critical for the nearly two million farms and ranches across the United States, as 97% are family-owned operations and 88% are considered small farms. Producers don’t have the time to navigate complex paperwork for financial management like IRS or U.S. Department of Agriculture forms. Yet, they need access to the resources these institutions provide, such as cost-share support and tax deductions to keep the farm business thriving.

Additionally, many farmers are looking to adopt soil health and regenerative agriculture practices, but they don’t have the financial support to make the multi-year systems transition. While these beneficial systems provide higher profit and resilience to farm operations over time, the initial few years of a soil health transition do require a financial investment.

Lastly, the farming population in the US is aging, and many new people want to get into agriculture. But farming is an inherently difficult industry to tap into due to the high costs of entry and technical knowledge gaps. Beginning and historically underserved farmers need assistance navigating the complex financial ecosystem that can support their burgeoning endeavors.

FarmRaise helps these populations of farmers – small and family farms, beginning and historically underserved farms, and soil health-minded farms – access vital financial resources they need. The FarmRaise app includes a farm funding app and a farm accounting app that work in tandem to make sure farmers are proactively organizing their finances and submitting up-to-date, quality application data to financial incentive programs to increase their chances of receiving funding. With a network of over 20,000 farmer members across the United States, and a key partnership with the USDA-Farm Service Agency, FarmRaise is scaling financial tools to promote profitable, sustainable and socially equitable farming systems across the United States.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
FarmRaise officially opened it’s virtual doors in March of 2020, about a week and half before the pandemic shut the physical world down. My co-founder, Jayce Hafner, and I met in graduate school in 2019. We were both in a join MBA / MS in Environment and Resources program at Stanford. Not many of our classmates were pursuing careers in agriculture, so we found kindred spirits in one another and compared notes. Over the course of several months, we interviewed dozens of farmers about the challenges they were facing in adopting soil health practices and accessing financing. This is how FarmRaise was born.

I’m a strong believer in the power of customer needsfinding for early stage entrepreneurs. It’s great to have a vision for something you want to build, but that will not guarantee that others will want and pay for your product or service. Instead, by orienting first around open-ended customer needsfinding, you can generate a robust understanding of the problem, and then leanly iterate on solutions until you find something powerful. Along the way, you develop relationships with the people that will ultimately be your first customers.

Five years later and we still employ customer needsfinding at FarmRaise today. We strive for 3 to 5 user interviews each week during development periods, working with farmers to get their feedback on our prototypes and designs. We also use our customer success platform as a data center, tagging and organizing customer requests by topic so that we can build a robust list of feature requests to drive our future roadmap.

This customer-centric approach is what sets us apart from others. We are a tech company, yet we also work with a population that wants to know the humans behind the tech and receive real-time support. I’m incredibly proud of the way we’ve been able to build a software company that incorporates compassion and care for our farmer customers into our daily work.

We also prioritize our employees. It can be difficult to balance the challenges of a startup company alongside an investment in organizational health and culture, but we see the latter as a critical component of our company’s success. In 2023, we won the Will Reed Top 100 award that acknowledges startups that are shaping the future of workplace culture, including a special designation as that year’s DEI luminary. We know that our company is a direct product of the people running it every day, and we want to ensure working at FarmRaise is an enriching opportunity that fosters growth for our employees.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I love Denver, and this is a fun question! I feel well equipped to answer, since I love to host friends and show them the area. And people are always coming through Denver thanks to our beautiful setting and DIA’s prominence.

I would recommend:

Monday morning hike at Table Mountain in Golden, followed by lunch at the Golden Mill food hall and taproom.

Tuesday morning yoga class at Rooted Heart with Taylor (great teacher!), followed by brunch at the Corner Beet.

Wednesday morning stroll around City Park and then a short walk to Uptown for brunch at OneFold (or we could grab a coffee from Lula Rose).

Thursday morning bike ride to the Cherry Creek reservoir, followed by brunch at Stowaway Kitchen and then lounging at Confluence Park before having a late afternoon tea at Babe’s Teahouse.

Friday morning coffee from Copper Door, followed by a tour of the Denver Botanic Gardens.

Favorite dinner spots include Potager (seasonal farm to table), Somebody People, Domo, Uncle, Temaki Den, and Wolf’s Tailor (for a special occasion). And then dessert at Sweet Izzy in Cherry Creek.

For afternoon and evening activities, I’d recommend going to see a movie at Sie or catching a Rockies game – I love Coors Field. The Botanic Gardens also have incredible events like their summer concert series or their autumnal and winter festivities like Glow in the Gardens.

Summer weekend activities must include a concert at Red Rocks, a big hike in the mountains, a gravel bike ride near Boulder, lounging and playing games in Washington Park or Cheesman Park, and visits to City Park and/or Pearl Street farmers markets to eat at the Easy Vegan or Dos Caras and pick up some fresh produce.

Winter weekend activities would of course be endless. Maybe a sunrise uphill ski at Winter Park?

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
As a college graduate, I was determining the best career path when I met an incredible researcher, educator and leader named Rob Myers. Rob saw potential in me and took a chance on hiring me to join a small team of farmer-focused grant administrators, researchers and scientists. He gave me great autonomy at work, while also teaching me more than any book or class could about the U.S. agricultural system. This helped my curiosity for agriculture grow into a career-defining passion that has led me to starting my own agtech company. I am so grateful for patient, curious and thoughtful leaders like Rob, who despite their incredible credentials promote the growth of others and the pursuit of common goals.

I’ve also benefited from relationships with other founders – my own inspiring co-founder included – who have been incredible sources of wisdom, insight and support in the process of starting a company. When founders share and learn from one another, powerful connection and momentum result. I’m so thankful for the other founders I’ve met along my journey.

Website: https://www.farmraise.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sami-tellatin/

Other: I love to write – check out AgPunk, my substack about agriculture, technology and science fiction. https://agpunk.co/

Image Credits
Various FarmRaise Team Members