Hello and welcome back to the early stage podcast, the show that takes a deep dive into rising young startups and their founders.

For today's conversation, I brought onboard David Potere, Co-Founder and CEO of Boston-based startup TellusLabs. His startup is in the business of using satellite imaging and machine learning to, at least in the present, project corn and soy crop yields. Commodities is the oldest marketplace in the world, and a lot of the technology around forecasting is world of mouth -- people calling grain dealers and reading charts by hand.

With machine learning as their guide, they started sending out email forecasts in early 2016 before they knew their algorithms would be accurate. Their bet paid off, with their final number for soy bushels per acre landing within 1% of the actual number a full 2 months before the US government.

With $3M recently banked from Hyperplane, Founder Collective, IA Ventures, Project 11, and others, David and his growing team are building our their web app and API to improve the lives of the grower and high frequency commodities trader alike.

Enjoy the conversation.