ONE WORLD Portfolio Company Exits
Congratulations to two of our Portfolio companies, Pasture Map and Freckle Education, for completing successful exits recently!
Earlier this year, PastureMap was acquired by Soilworks, a new ag-focused fund that operates under Soilworks Natural Capital, a public benefit corporation that works on accelerating environmentally critical regenerative practices. Since its inception, PastureMap has developed an application that helps farmers and ranchers manage their animal herds in order to promote sustainable land practices. Through the Soilworks acquisition, we are excited to see PastureMap grow and create an even greater impact in the regenerative farming movement.
In order to learn more about the future of PastureMap and recommendations to other entrepreneurs approaching the acquisition phase, we interviewed co founder and CEO, Christine Su.
Christine Su, Co-founder & CEO
Christine, what have you learned throughout this acquisition and what advice would you give to entrepreneurs that have not yet reached the exit phase?
“My advice to entrepreneurs is to be cultivating relationships with potential acquirers throughout your company life cycle - similarly to how you should cultivate relationships with investors regularly, not just when you're fundraising. I had already known Lew Moorman for several years, and we had discussed potential acquisition of PastureMap before. It's very hard to force an exit at a time of your choosing, if you don't already have those trusted relationships in place.”
How do you see PastureMap developing in the future and how will the acquisition with soilworks help your company create a greater impact in the regenerative agriculture industry?
“I'm excited to see SoilWorks grow the team - they already doubled the headcount at PastureMap in the first few months of transition, and continue to add new team members. What I'm most excited about is that SoilWorks is intending to expand regenerative practices more throughout the broader livestock industry. They have experienced management at the helm who have done this before in other industries, and a deep bench of talented software engineers, so I'm excited to see the platform continue to develop with more features that add value to farmers and ranchers.”
Additional details about the acquisition can be found here.
Sidharth Kakkar, Co-founder & CEO
Freckle Education
Next up, EdTech. One of the first investments in the ONE WORLD portfolio is Freckle Education, which was acquired by Renaissance Learning in May 2019 (more details here). Under Renaissance, Freckle will operate as a standalone brand but will be fully integrated into the Renaissance product suit. “We chose Freckle for its innovative approach to student-centered practice, instructional design and teacher tools,” said Todd Brekhus, chief product officer at Renaissance, in a prepared statement. “So many personalized learning programs suggest students should just put the headphones on, let the computer take over and wait for the learning to happen without the teacher’s involvement. With Freckle, we’re bringing educators a tool that puts them in control of targeting instruction and differentiating practice for students. The acquisition of Freckle is another step forward in our mission to continually extend and expand the impact of our solutions.”
Freckle helps teachers differentiate instruction quickly and to effectively deliver guided practice to students at their own academic level. The platform includes interactive student practice activities aligned to state standards, teacher resources such as progress reports and inquiry-based lesson plans and an administrator dashboard. With Freckle’s wide variety of high-quality teacher lessons and student activities, educators can differentiate not just what students learn, but how they learn it, engaging students in topics that already interest them and guiding them to learn in ways most effective for them individually.
“We launched Freckle because we believe every student deserves a world-class education, and the best way to deliver that is by empowering teachers to differentiate instruction for their students,” said Sidharth Kakkar, Freckle co-founder and CEO. “We’ve been honored to help hundreds of thousands of educators all across the country, and we couldn’t be more excited to see Freckle improve learning for so many more students with the expanded reach Renaissance will provide.”
We are excited to the important work that Christine and Sidharth started under their initial start-up, and now with the resources of the parent organizations, and the positive impact they have had in the fields of sustainable agriculture and public education, respectively. Despite the challenges that have come within the past several months, we are excited to see several of our portfolio companies thriving- Profitable Social Impact!