There’s a difference between solving a problem and getting people to use your solution. That’s what makes Verdi interesting.

The Vancouver-based startup just raised $6.5 million CAD (about $4.7M USD) in an oversubscribed seed round to scale its irrigation automation platform. That puts Verdi’s total funding at $9.5 million—real money for a company focused on one of agriculture’s most stubborn problems: getting modern tech onto legacy infrastructure.

The round was led by SVG Ventures, with participation from a long list of climate and ag-tech funds: NEC, Ponderosa Ventures, Elemental Impact, GenomeBC, One Small Planet, and others. That diversity of backers matters. It signals confidence from folks who know the long sales cycles and slow adoption curves in agriculture—and still believe Verdi can move fast.

Verdi doesn’t ask farms to tear out old systems and start from scratch. Instead, it retrofits intelligence onto what’s already there. That’s how they ended up automating irrigation for 5,000 acres tied to major food and beverage brands, saving farmers over $1 million in labor costs and more than 100 million liters of water last year.

It’s not flashy. But it works.

That’s what makes this funding round worth paying attention to. Verdi’s not pitching a vision of some far-off farming future. They’re putting affordable automation in place today, and that’s what climate resilience actually looks like on the ground.