Ganaz Secures $7 Million Series A Financing to Strengthen Working Families and the Essential Businesses that Supply our Food

Ganaz, the workforce management and financial services platform for agriculture and food manufacturing, today announced its $7M Series A financing led by Trilogy Equity with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders’ Co-op, Taylor Ventures, AgFunder and Techstars. This new round of investment will support further expansion of the company’s integrated workforce management and financial services platform serving farm workers, growers and food processors across North America.

The funding round comes after a year of explosive growth for Ganaz, during which it expanded its customer base of commercial growers nearly 10x during the COVID-19 pandemic and grew to serve over 175,000 food industry workers. Ganaz is the end-to-end people platform for agriculture and food processing, currently offering employee onboarding, training, communication and workforce analytics. Later this year the company will launch the Ganaz Mastercard® Payroll Card, delivering low-cost, digital financial services for a population that is largely unbanked, saving both workers and employers time and money. 

“We invested in Ganaz because we fundamentally believe that you can do very well by doing good, and we’ve seen that in other mission-driven companies in our portfolio. Ganaz’s early traction with industry leaders is testament to the fact that they have the passion and ability to listen to their customers and users to build solutions that are a win for employers and a win for workers,” said Peter van Oppen, a Partner at Trilogy Equity, who joins the Ganaz board with this financing. The company also recently welcomed Eric Bachman, former COO of digital payments unicorn Marqeta and former executive at US Bank and Wells Fargo, to its board. 

“Ganaz’s remarkable team empowers the underserved farm worker, grower and food processor with a workforce management platform to enable the fundamental businesses that supply our food to be safer, fairer, and more efficient,” said Tess Hatch, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. 

Agricultural employers face increasing margin compression due to supermarket consolidation and regulatory pressure. Ganaz helps growers lower costs by automating labor-intensive processes like hiring, training, worker communications and payments. Employers also face a worsening labor shortage; in one recent survey*, 56 percent of farmers reported being unable to hire the labor they needed. Ganaz provides solutions to attract and retain these essential workers. 

Workers also lose when employers don’t offer the right tools. In fact, agricultural workers lose up to 10% of their wages to predatory financial services like check cashing, remittances and payday loans. Beginning later this year, Ganaz will offer a family of low-cost digital financial services that will help workers save time and money and, over time, forge a path out of poverty for their families.

Hannah Freeman, Ganaz co-founder and CEO, adds, “We are conscious of both the huge opportunity ahead of us to digitize billions of dollars in payroll, as well as the responsibility to build inclusive, low-cost, wealth-building tools for workers. This responsibility is one of the reasons we chose to become a Public Benefit Corporation earlier this year. The investment from Trilogy and others gives us the ability to quickly scale our business and our impact by bringing in diverse talent to help us learn, grow and better serve the businesses and hard working families that feed us.”

About Trilogy Equity 

Formed in 2006, Trilogy Equity Partners (http://www.trilogyequity.com) is an early stage venture firm based in Bellevue, Washington that is led by former entrepreneurs and operators. The firm’s roots include the formation and leadership of some of the largest mobile operators in the United States as well as other global technology and wireless companies. Trilogy takes a hands-on approach to investing, with a closely held evergreen fund that aligns investments with the objective of building great companies over time.

*https://www.cfbf.com/news/survey-california-farms-face-continuing-employee-shortages/