by Graeme Thickins, Board Member, MinneAnalytics
What would a MinneAnalytics conference be without startups presenting promising, new innovations? The startup session at this second FASTcon event, held April 10, 2026, I counted as our 17th such session over the past decade! I decided to add a new wrinkle this time, by inviting three experienced startup experts to give brief talks as part of the session. They were all a big hit!
Jake Joraanstad kicked things off, telling the story of founding Bushel (based in Fargo), a very successful ag software firm that’s now raised $100 million. A bit later, we heard from longtime food and agtech investor Brett Brohl, managing partner at Bread and Butter Ventures, who talked about what’s worked and what hasn’t over the past decade. We were also lucky enough to hear from Sarah Bain, managing director of the Techstars Future of Food accelerator, who told us about the many benefits for startups that go through that three-month program. A big thanks to all three!
During the all-morning session, we heard from ten very motivated startups, who all pitched their hearts out! Here’s a rundown:
701x (Fargo ND) – enabling “The Autonomous Rancher” with satellite-enabled GPS ear tags for cattle, designed to help ranchers track their cattle’s locations, calving, and bull productivity. Its software lets clients get location records of livestock in the pasture, feedlot, and during transport.
Alure LLC (Shakopee MN) – MN Cup winner that uses insecticide-treated netting technology to eliminate invasive pests, starting with the Japanese Beetle pest-management market. This is a highly invasive pest that ravages more than 300 plant species.
Firstshift.ai (San Francisco CA) –an AI-native supply chain planning platform for enterprises managing complex SKUs across locations, delivering intelligent demand forecasting, inventory optimization, and agentic planning without the heavy lift of legacy systems.
Liminal Network (Minneapolis MN) – building tools to solve practical problems in communications as supply chains grow more complex, causing breakdowns that raise costs and aggravate customers. Its API Hub provides businesses with real-time communication with their partners.
MorphMind (Cambridge MA) – a no-code platform that lets data scientists and enterprise teams create domain-specific AI agents to automate complex analytics and research workflows, reducing cycles from weeks to minutes. Separates AI-generated interpretation from the underlying data, code, and computation.
Rotational Labs (St. Paul MN) – has built Endeavor, an AI Accountability Platform that lets businesses prototype, evaluate, deploy, and monitor trusted, purpose-built agents. The platform streamlines manual, repetitive work, creates monetizeable agents, and gives employees greater capacity to focus on customers, innovation, and higher-value work.
SCO2 (Little Canada MN) – next-generation biomass extraction technology that unlocks value and innovation at scale for the food, beverage, nutraceutical, pharmacy, pet, beauty, and industrial chemical industries, delivering economic, sustainability, and competitive advantage.
Swinergy (Minneapolis MN) –modular, multi-stage anaerobic digestion technology to rapidly extract methane gas from bio-waste. Its first commercial deployment is in the upper Midwest swine market, converting manure from pit barns into renewable natural gas.
Verdethos (Fargo-Moorhead) – a global supply chain collaboration platform for coffee, palm oil, and grain suppliers and processors to manage traceability, compliance, quality, operations. Trading partners share trusted data, workflows, and improve overall efficiency. Expanding into US and Brazil corn and soybean markets, and adding AI-enhanced analytics.
Vireo Ag (St. Paul MN) – next-generation plant genome editing tools enabling single-generation, transgene-free, tissue-culture-free editing directly in elite crops. Helps companies shorten crop-development timelines by 70%. Modifies plants directly in the greenhouse, a streamlined process that turns multi-year lab cycles into single plant generation.
I think all who attended will agree – we were inspired by each and every presenter! We wish them all the best going forward, and have already heard some great connections happened. Whether you attended or not, check out this link for access to PDFs of all the startup pitch decks. We encourage you to reach out to the presenters, who are identified on each PDF. Engage with them or help them if you can. And be sure to come see the next Startup Showcase at Data Tech 2026 on May 15!
