Exits are rare in agtech—and hearing the tactical details can help founders and investors navigate their own paths to success. 

So I was stoked that Guillaume Jourdain agreed to speak recently to our Ag Ventures course about building and selling Bilberry, the spot-spraying technology company acquired by Trimble in 2022.

What struck me about Guillaume's approach was the intentionality behind every decision. From day one, Bilberry's team had a clear goal: build to sell for $100M. They didn’t want to build a company worth $1B on paper, or to IPO. And this goal shaped everything, from fundraising strategy, to go-to-market and partnerships, to geographic expansion. 

And here's what I found most valuable: Bilberry’s thoughtful framework for what they did and didn't need to build. They focused relentlessly on proving a strong ROI in one market (Australia) rather than scaling globally. They kept their valuation reasonable to preserve exit optionality. They built deep industry relationships without explicitly courting buyers. 

Here's our conversation.

Let's start with your journey into agtech. Why agtech? And how did Bilberry start?

I was actually studying mechanical engineering, and I just knew I really wanted to start a business. I wasn't really sure what it would be, but I was going to events, listening to speakers, and I was fascinated by entrepreneurship. So I met with a couple of college friends, and we said, "Hey, we are engineers. We love technology. Let's do something with drones." This was back in 2014, so professional drones were just really starting.

We said, "Okay, what can we do with drones?" And we thought, "Hey, we can fly over large areas, so maybe agriculture could be a good fit." We knew nothing about agriculture. I had never been on a farm before, so we just took the Yellow Pages, looked up farmers, and started calling saying, "Hey, can we meet?"

Then we started going on farms and asking very silly questions: "What can we do with our drones? What are your problems?" That's how we started our discovery phase. It was really messy, that's for sure. I'm starting a new company now, and I'm trying to be way more structured. 

When we asked these questions—"What are your issues? What are your problems?"—very often they were saying, "Hey, the chemical costs are just going up. Resistance is going up. We don't have a solution, and it doesn't make any sense. We just spray the whole field when the weeds are just in some specific places. How can we change that?"

We thought we could solve this with drones. We’d just make a map and then include this map in the sprayer. We started working on this assumption. But through the discovery phase, we understood that farmers do so many things all the time, and if on top of that, they've got to either fly a drone or just order the flight of a drone, then take the map to a sprayer—it's just another issue for them. So we said, let’s kill the drone idea and put the cameras on the booms of the sprayer, and it's going to be easier.

When you started out, what was the vision for success? Were you thinking build and sell, or IPO?

The thesis was: we want to build and sell. I still remember, we were in our incubator. And answering this was really theoretical at that time - we had never worked in our lives - but we were pushed to think about exit. And we agreed that we want to sell for at least $100 million,  otherwise it's going to be a big failure.  So that was our grand plan from the beginning: build to sell for $100 million in five years.

Did you have more granularity around that $100 million—like OEMs, private equity, or other players?

Not from the start, but when we started growing, we definitely looked into that. We formalized this approach of "What would an exit look like?" We saw three options of players that could acquire us.

First, IPO—I think in ag, that's not really something that's happening. So we decided not to aim to be the outlier. Let's aim for something that has more chances of happening.

Then we asked, who's buying companies? The most likely for us would have been the machinery guys: the likes of John Deere, CNH. These guys do acquire companies, and pay a decent amount of money. There are quite a few acquisitions for $200-300 million. So we agreed that was the most likely option.

The second option was precision ag companies. The likes of Trimble, Topcon. They are in the space and focusing on precision, so could make sense for what we were doing.

The third option, which was more far-fetched but we thought maybe it could happen since they have very deep pockets, would be the likes of Bayer and Syngenta. It wasn't exactly what they were doing, but we were actually making their products - their chemicals - go further by applying them in a better way. We thought there could be some synergies, and maybe that could be an option.

How did that thinking about timeline, amount, and potential buyers impact your decisions around fundraising, geography, and milestones?

It was definitely a factor we had in mind. When we looked at them, we knew that it was very unlikely that any of them would buy us for more than $100 million. That would be possible, but then you're really part of the outliers in ag. So we said the sweet spot is probably between $50-100 million. If we can aim for that, that's easier.

But that means you should not have a valuation that's too high in your previous round. Otherwise, the return for investors just isn't there. Our second round of fundraising was back in 2021—we raised about €2 million, and our post-money valuation was about €10 million. So €10 million to where we landed, north of €50 million, makes it a decent return for investors, depending on how long they stay. In our case, that was less than 18 months, so it was definitely a very good return. So that's the first thing: valuation on the last round should not be too high.

The second thing is, we thought about the strengths and weaknesses of these companies. Their weakness: it’s very difficult for large companies to innovate—lots of politics, lots of things going on. So they are fond of innovation. On the other hand, where they are good is that they've got international networks with sales and service all around the world. 

What did this mean for us? We thought, "Okay, we will try to be present in one country and that's it. But let's prove that in this country we are super strong. Let's not try to be in 10 countries."

Tell me more about that, because there's often pressure—whether from investors or excitement—to scale and expand globally.

Well, first, on an operational level, it's going to be tough because two countries are different culturally, and in ag, it's even more true. Crops are different, the cycles are different, complexity is huge.

Our strong belief was that cameras on sprayers just makes so much sense. Why would you spray everywhere when you can just spray where you need to? We were telling ourselves and telling VCs and everyone, "Hey, this technology is going to be fully standard in 10 to 15 years." However, market penetration speed is going to be very different from one market to the other, depending on different conditions. We tried to think very deeply and specifically about what those conditions are.

The first driving condition was return on investment. So how soon do you get your money back from the cameras? What was driving the return on investment was chemical savings. That was the number one thing. It's very easy to calculate. Chemical savings were driven by, first, how much do you spend today—your herbicide spend.

Then, how many weeds are there in your field? You don't want too many weeds. If you've got just 5% weeds in your field, it means you will do 95% savings. If you've got 95% weeds, you will only do 5% savings. Just as an example, France is not a good spot for that, because there's quite a bit of rain, and rain tends to make things grow. Australia—not so much rain. Things don't grow a lot, so also not many weeds. So you can do great savings.

The third driving factor is size, obviously, because it's a multiplying factor. The more hectares you have, the more savings you can make. So that return on investment was the first big criteria.

How else did you decide? Was there a scorecard or specific criteria to select and prioritize geography?

We looked at Australia, North America, South America (Brazil, Argentina), Western Europe, Eastern Europe. We looked at all those and had a first kind of scorecard thing. Australia was already quite high on the map. But then we met with more local people and tried to understand all the very specific things about the market that would be a go or no-go.

I've got five or six other things that were important. The first thing is that green-on-brown was already there. Green-on-brown was spraying in broad acres in different crops. It meant that farmers were actually asking for green-on-green. In France, when you were talking about spot spraying, you had to explain the whole concept, because green-on-brown was not a thing.

Second thing: Australian farmers are known for being early adopters. So that was another plus.

We didn't want too much tank mix, because if you mix fungicides and herbicides together, then spot spraying doesn't make sense. That's one of the big issues in the US. They do a lot of tank mixing, so if you want to start spot spraying, you might have to have dual tanks or other options. Complexity goes up.

This brings me to my next point about trying to aim for the low-hanging fruit. If you don't have too many crops in the rotation, technological development is going to be easier. Also, if you've got easy-to-detect weeds, it's going to be easier. The first big weed we went after was wild radish in wheat in Western Australia—a huge problem. Very high chemical cost, super easy to detect. So basically it was a no-brainer to start with that. We could get very good market traction on that and solid market penetration, just focusing on Western Australia.

What was the maturity of the technology when you were making that scorecard? It sounds like you were actually thinking this through looking forward, not just in hindsight.

We started working in Australia in 2017-2018. It was an opportunity—we were working through sprayer manufacturers. We wanted to sell through sprayer manufacturers, not direct. By selling us as an option to farmers, it made it easier on the selling side, and we could focus more on technology.

With Agrifac, a Dutch sprayer manufacturer, they said, "Hey, there's a big market in Australia, let's go there." So we sold a couple of systems, and then we spent two years going back and forth to Australia. We started saying, "Hey, we keep going over there. Let's try to be strategic about it." At that time, the technology was not really working.

The first happy customer was back in 2020. So first sale of the product was 2017, probably our first 5-10 early adopters. Most of them just gave the systems back and were very unhappy, because we had an approach where we would be selling all the time before anything was developed. It was great to give confidence on the product-market fit, but let's say we learned the hard way about "under promise and over deliver." We were definitely over-promising and under-delivering. So we learned that the hard way.

We had our first happy customers in around 2020. But during that time, we tried to become more strategic about everything. We started building the scorecard. Obviously the scorecard was minimalist in the beginning, and then it became better and better. By the time we sold the company, we had proven the case in Australia, which was great. We could say, "Hey, in Australia, happy customers, good traction, making money over there."

Also, since we had this scorecard and had processed so many other things in a similar way—we had processed it over several years, like developing new algorithms that was quite tough at the time, but also other things—we had a kind of infrastructure that made it look like it was easy to copy and paste into a new geography. I think that was super important for the buyer to say, "Hey, one, it's working. And two, it seems like it's going to be easy to copy and paste."

How did you recover from those early unsatisfied customers? What was your strategy to convince them to give you a second chance?

We would just go on the farm with them, sit on the sprayer with a bunch of spare parts, and just spray the whole week with them. When something was breaking, we would just fix it, waiting for the newer version to come and be able to fix it in the long run. I think we showed super strong commitment to fixing the things that we did wrong. We made mistakes. We said, "Hey, it was a mistake. We are sorry, and we are going to work harder to fix it."

I think—and that's one of the pieces of feedback we received a lot—the guys were saying, "Hey, you are the CEO, founder and CEO, and you are actually in Australia already. That's a big commitment." Australia is far from France. You are moving away from your family. And then I was going on the farms, so I was obviously not the one doing most of the support stuff most of the time. But when there were issues, I would be coming on a farm on a regular basis to just fix stuff. As a CEO, I could solve quite a few things, which showed that we were committed to our customers.

I think that's probably the reason why some of them said, "Hey, okay, that's fine, guys. We like you." I think we had a very high—it's not friendship, but people just liked us. We were just simple. We would just come on a farm, when someone would help us, the day after, we would just come back with some beers, have a beer with them, and just chat. So it was also quite simple. I think just being nice.

How did you think about technical milestones versus milestones that might help you raise the next round? What trade-offs were real for you?

We sold the company in November 2022, and we did our previous round in April or May 2021. It was actually a bridge round, because we were very happy about the customer satisfaction. For a year, customers were saying, "Hey, that's great." Actually, a few customers became investors as well in that round, because they said, "It's changing how we approach agriculture. It's amazing, and it's working."

So very happy about customer satisfaction, very happy about the team and the technology, very happy about patents. By the time we sold, we had about 40 or 50 patents granted. So we had lots of things checked.

The one reason why we said, "Let's not do Series A now"—because we might do it, but it might be much harder than a bridge round—is that the traction was not good enough. We were probably doing somewhere between €1-2 million revenue going up, but before it was a lot of R&D work. It was transitioning to proper product revenue. But we thought if we gave it one more year, we were going to be in a great place to actually raise a solid €10-15 million Series A. So that's why we did the bridge.

Basically six months to 12 months later, I think we were in a good position if we had to raise money. We ended up selling the company, but we actually received a few term sheets from funds that were super solid term sheets with amazing terms.

Let's talk about the acquisition. How did the conversation with Trimble start?

We did not do the thing of building a long-term relationship with potential buyers. We did not work on that. But what we did work on was building solid relationships in the industry—proper relationships.

For instance, Trimble had acquired a company called Müller-Elektronik, basically working on electronics for agriculture. We had a common project with Müller on a specific brand of sprayer. The end customers were super happy, so Müller was using us to showcase that technology. We had a very good relationship with the tech team of Müller. So I think when Trimble looked at different potential targets, they talked to Müller to have some feedback, and the feedback was very positive.

We knew Müller, and we also knew lots of people in the industry—influencers, guys very famous on nozzles on Twitter, other guys working on podcasts and stuff like that. Just building relationships. I remember sometimes they had questions, and we would just give them some insights, tell them not to share them, but actually just building the relationship in a good way.

Trimble approached us. We were not selling the company. They approached us and said, "Hey, we want to do a partnership, like a strategic partnership." After a month, they said, "It's actually M&A." But they approached us with that.

Every time they were talking to people who have knowledge in the industry, 90% of the time, we actually had a connection with these people. So I think it established a lot of trust, saying, "Hey, these guys are probably legit. They've got happy customers. They know the people in the industry. We don't hear too many bad things."

We did not build a relationship with Trimble, but we did build relationships with key players in the industry.

How much do you think market timing played into the exit and Trimble's willingness to pay?

It was definitely great timing. Also, when it comes to Trimble, Trimble just divested or made a joint venture with the Trimble ag division to AGCO. It was announced a few months after we got acquired. So I'm not sure it would have happened if the JV was done before. So definitely the timing was really good for us.

Also, at the time, there were not many players—serious players. There were lots of startups, but I think just two or three were serious when we were acquired. One other serious one was an Israeli startup. They started way after us, but they raised a lot of money. By the time Trimble approached us, the valuation on their last round was probably around $100 million. So it just made them not a target. And that's a point back to my previous comment: be careful about valuation.

Were there any investors who really helped on your journey, or things that investors could have helped more with?

We only had business angels and no VCs. We had quite a few business angels. Some of them actually invested fairly small tickets, but we wanted them on board for the expertise. We had fantastic experts on board. Some of them were part of the board, and some of them we would just call on a regular basis, like a sort of committee, to actually help build the scorecards. The scorecards we didn't build on our own—we got people to help us. Different people helped us on different topics.

Now I'm part of a few companies as a board member. What I try to bring to the table—I think investors can really be super toxic or super helpful, and the problem is that as soon as you are not super helpful, you are just slowing down the company. If you are not super helpful, meaning you are not an expert in something (and it can be finance, it can be different things—it doesn't have to be the market), just don't be in the room and don't bother the founders. Just explaining things takes a lot of time, a lot of energy, building the reporting and stuff for people that don't get it and just ask questions that shouldn't be asked. I think it's terrible.

And now that I'm a board member in two companies, that's what I try to do. One is in spraying in broadacre and I've got a lot to bring. But for other companies, I'm like, "If you want to call me, call me. But otherwise, just don't bother," because I know how much energy it takes.

What advice would you have for agtech founders looking to achieve something like what you achieved with Billberry?

I talk to lots of founders these days that start businesses in ag, and the number one thing I tell them is valuation. Just be careful about that, because you don't want to—if your goal is to sell the company—you don't want to price yourself out of the market. There are always stories where you need a lot of funding, but then you've got to be very aware that you are playing to be the outlier.