PickTrace Gets Terminus Backing for Farm Software Expansion

A bin of fruit arriving at a warehouse carries information the payroll office also needs: work happened in a particular place, with a particular crew, before the load reached the receiving bay. PickTrace has built farm software around those connected records, giving a workforce-management business a practical route into the rest of agricultural operations.

Terminus Capital Partners announced a majority growth investment in PickTrace on October 13, 2026, with terms undisclosed. The Glendale, California company plans to expand its platform, product development and customer support while retaining its agricultural focus. For growers, the consequence is a software supplier trying to carry more of the journey from hiring a worker to understanding what the farm produced.

PickTrace brings a majority partner into farm software

The investment brings Terminus Capital Partners, an Atlanta private equity firm focused on majority investments in business software, into a company founded by brothers Austin Steed and Harrison Steed. Both founders will continue partnering with TCP, according to the announcement. PickTrace CEO Damon Valenzona described deeper investment in the team, platform and customer service as priorities for the partnership.

The transaction amount, valuation and precise ownership percentage were not disclosed. A majority growth investment also leaves unanswered how much consideration goes into the company and how much changes hands between shareholders. Assigning a venture-series label or presenting an estimated total as new operating capital would give readers a financial picture the participants have not supplied.

That leaves the operating rationale as the most useful part of the announcement. TCP founder Alex Western emphasized PickTrace's position in labor information, onboarding documents and wage records. His interest points toward the commercial value of software already involved in a grower's recurring work: extending a trusted relationship can give a supplier an opportunity to support more departments.

TCP says it will provide strategic and operational support as PickTrace develops that broader role. The opportunity comes with an obligation to preserve the usefulness of the original product as its responsibilities expand. Payroll remains somebody's immediate concern even when a software company is discussing a much larger platform.

The Steed brothers started with their own farm

PickTrace's company history traces the original concept to Austin Steed and Harrison Steed's family farm in Southern California in 2013. Blueberries, avocados and citrus gave the brothers direct exposure to manual payroll calculations and productivity tracking. The company records its first outside customer in 2014 and participation in Y Combinator in 2015, a progression from solving a family problem to supporting other growers.

That history matters because the buyer's working environment is part of the product. A crew leader, a payroll administrator and a receiving manager can encounter the same operation through very different tasks. Asking them to use connected software means understanding those differences well enough that each person can do useful work without becoming an expert in somebody else's department.

Today, the official leadership page identifies Harrison Steed as president, Austin Steed as a founder and board member, and Damon Valenzona as CEO. Their continued involvement gives the majority partnership a connection to the business's original agricultural experience. It also puts the expansion agenda beside people who have already seen growers turn product decisions into everyday operating habits.

The company describes customers across the United States and several international markets, including Mexico, Peru, Chile and Australia. Those are company-reported footprint claims, rather than a published financial measure of international scale. The relevant point for the product is variation: supporting growers across operating environments requires software and implementation practices that can accommodate different work routines.

Payroll records give the platform an operational center

PickTrace Onboarding offers document scanning, employee self-hire links, English and Spanish workflows, and payroll exports. These features address the administrative work surrounding a workforce before a shift produces its first piece record. Keeping the employee record connected to later work can reduce the need to enter the same information again in another system.

The company's Time & Productivity tools support field and warehouse labor tracking, including online and offline use. PickTrace describes wage calculations covering piecework, breaks and overtime, alongside integrations with payroll providers such as Famous and Datatech. These are product capabilities described by the vendor; employers still need to evaluate how the software fits their own payroll processes and responsibilities.

Receiving adds a different audience for information from the field. PickTrace's receiving product follows bins and boxes into truck loads, creates digital load tickets and records arrivals. The company also describes quality flags and synchronization with enterprise resource planning or warehouse management systems, extending the record into the facility handling the crop.

The investment logic is visible in those connections. A supplier whose software helps establish who worked, where the work happened and what was produced has an opportunity to make related operating decisions easier. Expanding across those handoffs requires the company to keep each record understandable to the next person using it, including people who never saw the original field entry.

Customer support travels with the expansion

PickTrace's product materials describe in-person implementation, emergency support and bilingual customer operations. That service component deserves room in the growth discussion, because a feature can only become part of a farm's routine when somebody can explain it, configure it and help the customer use it. The company's announced investment in customer-facing capacity sits directly beside its product ambitions.

For a grower evaluating the partnership, practical questions follow from that combination. Which existing workflows will change, how will payroll data move between systems, and who will help staff learn the additional tools? The announcement provides the direction of investment while leaving detailed rollout plans and commercial terms for later customer conversations.

Agricultural innovation reaches growers through several routes. DevCuration's coverage of BioConsortia's microbial seed-treatment financing concerns a different part of the farm's decisions; PickTrace's transaction focuses on the information and people carrying out the work. The distinction helps locate this deal within agricultural technology without pretending the businesses compete for the same job.

Damon Valenzona and the Steed brothers now have a majority partner alongside a platform serving several parts of a grower's day. As PickTrace extends that platform, a crew's field record will keep reaching people with a new question to answer about the harvest, the load or the paycheck. Supporting those people is part of the expansion the investment is intended to make possible.