Texas-based GrainChain, a company building an agricultural blockchain for supply chain tracking, said today it has raised $29 million in a new funding round to accelerate growth across the U.S. and Latin America.

The round included investments from Overstock.com Inc., which participated in the company’s previous rounds via Medici Ventures, Pelion Venture Partners and Brigham Young University via BYU Cougar Capital. That brings the total raised by the company to $39.7 million over its cumulative funding rounds.

GrainChain uses a distributed ledger blockchain platform to offer solutions to farmers, distributors, grocers and other agricultural businesses to receive faster payments by tracking the supply of tradable commodities between farms and buyers in order to create fair markets. Its solutions include the tracking of data from seed to harvest, inventory management, as well as logistics for delivery and transportation.

“2022 was a breakout year for GrainChain in many ways,” said GrainChain co-founder and Chief Executive Luis Macias. “We saw explosive growth as our transaction platform, Trumodity, became fully integrated with banking systems in Latin America and when we launched liquidity programs with coffee producers in Mexico and Central America.”

In January, GrainChain opened a relationship with one of the biggest coffee exporters in Mexico, Exportadora de Café California (a division of coffee importer Neumann Kaffee Gruppe), which supplies a significant number of the coffee roasters worldwide with coffee beans both directly and through its sister importing companies.

So far, GrainChain has also onboarded thousands of small-scale producers of coffee and other commodities across Central America. The company also supports operations for MasterBarter in Brazil, a company created to make bartering more accessible to farmers and create financial inclusion for operators and workers who don’t have access to central banking.

Blockchain technology allows businesses to gain operational transparency by recording every transaction to a distributed ledger that can be checked by third parties to prove that data hasn’t been tampered with. Using the blockchain, farmers can track crates and pallets of food into commodities that can be tracked through their entire journey from farm to shelf. On the same blockchain, these commodities can be bought and sold, meaning that it can provide a mechanism for faster payments and title transfer.

That’s also the goal behind the IBM Food Trust Network, which is used to register and track numerous types of goods in order to ensure the safety of food throughout the entire agricultural supply chain in order to prevent food-borne illnesses.

GrainChain currently operates in four regions including the United States, Mexico, Brazil and Central America. It said that it will use the additional funding to accelerate the expansion and market growth of its agricultural product solutions.

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