When our team meets entrepreneurs we almost always ask, What’s your story? to better understand both the history of the startup and its technology. After nearly a decade of venture investing in the food and agriculture sector, we have heard more than 2,000 such stories. In the past few years, we have noticed some interesting plot twists. More and more companies are leveraging technologies first developed and commercialized to serve the military, energy and healthcare sectors for application to the food and agriculture sector. We believe funding these types of pivots with the right team may yield outsized returns for investors.

MILITARY

If asked to describe the early days of a typical startup, most of us would think about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak working late into the night in a dimly lit garage, or Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg working just as late in an equally dimly lit dorm room. While we don't normally associate Uncle Sam with innov