Workforce compliance and labor management software firm PickTrace has closed a majority growth investment from Terminus Capital Partners, positioning the AgTech platform to deepen its footprint across specialty agriculture at a moment when growers face compounding pressure on labor costs, compliance requirements, and operational visibility.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Moelis and JonesSpross advised Terminus Capital Partners; Software Equity Group and Holland & Knight advised PickTrace.
Why This Deal Matters
For food and beverage operators who source from specialty growers — berry, citrus, and avocado producers chief among them — the consolidation and capitalization of upstream farm-management platforms directly affects supply chain transparency and traceability expectations. PickTrace's stack covers workforce onboarding, time and productivity tracking, payroll, compliance workflows, field operations, logistics, and quality control. When that data layer gets deeper and more standardized, buyers downstream gain better visibility into labor practices and harvest conditions — increasingly important as retailer and foodservice ESG audit requirements tighten.
PickTrace was founded by brothers Austin and Harrison Steed, who grew up working on their family's blueberry, avocado, and citrus operation in Southern California. That grower-side origin distinguishes the platform from enterprise-down competitors: the product was built to solve problems the founders experienced firsthand in the field, and that design philosophy has shaped the company's white-glove implementation model.
The Capital Thesis
Alex Western, Founder and Managing Director of Terminus Capital Partners, described PickTrace as a critical infrastructure vendor because it collects proprietary labor data, serves as the system of record for onboarding paperwork and wage data, and underpins payroll, compliance, and farm management for its clients. The specialty grower AgTech market remains fragmented, and TCP sees the current PickTrace position — labor compliance and time-and-productivity as a system of record — as the right beachhead from which to build a broader operating layer.
CEO Damon Valenzona framed the investment as an acceleration of the company's existing trajectory: deeper investment in team, platform, and customer service, without a pivot away from the agricultural market that defined its growth.
For operators and procurement teams tracking labor-cost intelligence upstream, this deal signals that institutional capital is now flowing into the compliance and workforce-data layer of specialty agriculture — the same layer that increasingly feeds into food-safety audits, traceability programs, and cost-of-goods forecasting for buyers at the retail and foodservice level.
What Operators Should Watch
The investment mirrors a broader pattern in foodservice and food production tech: platforms that began as point solutions for a single workflow — in PickTrace's case, labor compliance — are attracting growth equity to expand into adjacent operational categories. See also how procurement-intelligence platforms in the hospitality technology space have followed a similar consolidation arc over the past two years.
For food and beverage brands and distributors evaluating supplier relationships, a better-capitalized PickTrace means the grower operations they buy from are likely to run more standardized data infrastructure — which can simplify compliance documentation requests and accelerate due-diligence cycles. Operators building operator intelligence programs around supply-chain risk should flag this category of AgTech investment as a leading indicator of upstream operational maturity.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
