TL;DRHarvey crossed $11B by wrapping legal data around a foundation model. Agriculture’s fragmented $500B data layer is now the next vertical AI frontier, with USDA’s $300M Palantir deal validating the thesis and GrowersTech building the domain-specific intelligence stack from inside the industry.
In legal, Harvey crossed an $11 billion valuation and Legora is racing to claim the European market behind it. In healthcare, Abridge has built a multi-billion-dollar business turning clinical conversations into structured medical records. In customer service, Sierra is now valued at over $15 billion, making it one of the fastest companies in AI history to reach that mark. The architecture in every case is identical: a foundation model wrapped in proprietary data, a domain ontology, and the workflow logic of a single complex industry. Vertical AI has become the most reliably category-defining bet in the current AI cycle.
The question every investor is now asking is which sector goes next, and how big the prize is when it does.
One answer keeps coming back: agriculture.
The numbers underneath it are easy to miss. McKinsey has estimated that connecting agriculture’s fragmented data could add $500 billion to global GDP. U.S. crop farmers alone spend roughly $72 billion a year on seed, fertilizer, and crop protection. The AI-in-agriculture market is forecast to more than triple this decade, growing from $2.43 billion in 2025 to over $8 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence. And every dollar of value in that expansion is gated by a single bottleneck: the data layer running underneath every decision in the global food system is broken.The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
