Canadian commodity platform provider ClearCost has closed its Series A round for an undisclosed amount of money with support from private equity firms SaskWorks Venture Fund and Motiv Ventures, allowing the start-up to launch a new product in early 2027 and help it build out its team, Keith Busch, company founder, told AgNavigator.
Founded in 2024, ClearCost is a platform to track fertilizer prices and movements of inputs — whether by train, truck, or shipment — in real-time and allows farmers to contract physical delivery of fertilizers, per previous AgNavigator reporting. Farmers access the platform for free, but ClearCost owns all the data around transactions and logistics.
Over the last year and a half, ClearCost has built out the platform, including by registering as a payment service provider and a money service business in Canada and doing something similar in the U.S. through partnerships, Busch noted. The company plans to launch the revamped platform continent-wide early next year.
“We took 18 months of feedback from our users about how they want to trade fertilizer and what we need to do to make it a better venue for trading, and so that customer feedback is leading the redesign,” Busch elaborated.
On the financing and payment piece, he added, “Ag is a low-margin, high-volume industry. You can’t apply consumer metrics to it and charge people 3% to process payments for a fertilizer that makes 5%. It’s crazy. So, we built this model.”
Fertilizers in the crosshairs as supply chain volatility persists
Amid ongoing geopolitical tension, farmers are continuing to grapple with cost and supply concerns, especially related to nitrogen and phosphorus.
“Fertilizer is in the crosshairs of a lot of powerful organizations right now because, rightfully so, the cost of production is through the roof, and the risk that farms are carrying is as one old-time fertilizer cowboy told me a couple weeks ago, he goes, ‘I haven’t seen this since the ’80s,’” Busch said.
Nearly 25-30% of the global supply of nitrogen is being blocked due to the conflict in Iran, which is impacting price, Busch explained. Once things stabilize in the region, more nitrogen will finally hit the market and prices will drop, he added.
Phosphorus is a different story since sulfur, which is a key fertilizer precursor and a petroleum byproduct, is in short supply, Busch noted. “For every ton of phosphorus, there’s 0.4 tons of sulfur in the manufacturing process,” he noted.
“The forecasts we’ve seen are that the global phosphorus market is going to produce 55-60% of its annual average output this year, and that’s a function of sulfur scarcity,” Busch elaborated.
