– Brilliant Harvest, an AI-powered helpdesk helping ag equipment dealers streamline interactions with farmers, has raised a $4 million seed round.
– The round was backed by new investors FTW Ventures, Alpaca VC, Automotive Ventures, SVG Ventures and NYA Ventures, alongside existing backers Builders VC and AltaML.
– The capital injection comes on the back of multiyear renewals with Rocky Mountain Equipment and Titan Machinery and significant growth at CNH, which now offers the platform at 50% of its large dealer locations.
“Working to bring Titan’s information to our teams in one place will give us another tool to improve customer response time.” Brad Meyer, director of service operations, Titan Machinery
Why it matters
Founded by Remi Schmaltz, an industry veteran who has built two agtech companies—ag retailer DynAgra and farm management software company Decisive Farming—Brilliant Harvest was designed to address pain points experienced by farmers and equipment dealers.
The white label app, custom branded to each dealership, ingests work orders, proprietary knowledge from the dealers’ systems based on previous interactions with customers, and technical manuals, some of which are thousands of pages long. The AI assistant interrogates these in seconds to answer inquiries from customers, technicians, service and aftermarket teams.
While talking to an experienced human rep is ideal, that person is not available 24:7, and may not be able to provide accurate information as quickly as an AI assistant, says Schmaltz.
“We’re trying to make things easier for customers but also for employees at dealers trying to figure things out without having to ask 100 questions to fellow coworkers.”
When customers call or visit, he notes, staff might have to search through multiple disconnected systems—ERPs, SharePoint, or manufacturer portals—to find answers. “This inability to provide real-time information forces customers to wait for callbacks, while employees lose 15–30 minutes chasing data and playing phone tag. The result is a fractured workflow and a poor customer experience.”
“Brilliant Harvest has cracked the code on ‘support deflection’ in a way we rarely see,” said Steve Greenfield, general partner at investor Automotive Ventures.
“Dealers are drowning in low-value phone calls that kill service absorption rates. Brilliant Harvest stops the phone from ringing with trivial questions so high-value technicians can focus on billable hours and customers experience first-contact resolution. It’s a pragmatic, high-ROI application of AI that dealerships are adopting immediately.”
Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) verification
While this might appear to be something firms could build in-house, equipment manufacturers and dealers are not software development companies, observes Schmaltz. And most dealers sell lots of brands, so even if a manufacturer comes up with a solution, it’s not going to support other companies’ brands.
And while Brilliant Harvest’s system must be integrated with the in-house systems of each ag equipment dealer it works with, the underpinning platform itself is standardized and scalable, with a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) verification layer built in, he says.
“Dealers partner with us for one reason: highly accurate answers. Because dealership data can be messy and fragmented, we use a Human-in-the-Loop verification process to transform disparate sources into a unified, reliable format—ensuring both accuracy and equipment safety. Unlike siloed AI assistants, our platform facilitates seamless human-to-AI and human-to-human communication, ensuring users always have full context regarding the source of their information.”
Ultimately, Brilliant Harvest is addressing a talent problem, he says: “With talent shortages and high turnover, dealerships use us to make a year-one technician have the knowledge of a year-10 veteran by giving them instant access to tribal knowledge and technical manuals from across all locations and brands of the dealership.”
ROI is ‘immediate and quantifiable’
When it comes to barriers, the “primary hurdle is AI skepticism born from hallucinations in generic tools such as ChatGPT and lots of noise from AI consultants selling stuff. We overcome this by emphasizing our ‘ground truth’ ingestion. We only provide cited knowledge from the dealer’s own equipment manuals, ERP data and conversational data.”
Meanwhile, the ROI is “immediate and quantifiable,” he claimed. “If we save a technician just 30 minutes a day—time previously spent walking to the parts counter or scrolling PDFs—that translates to over $2,000 in billable revenue per tech, per month.”
Finally, speed of implementation is key, he said. “We can have dealers operational with their own mobile app and web platform in under 30 days for ERPs such as DIS, IntelliDealer, e-Emphasys and brands we already work with including CNH, Kubota, and AGCO. We compliment the dealer’s existing ERP and CRM [customer relationship management system]; we’re not competing in those functionalities at all.”
The sweet spot
While Brilliant Harvest can provide value to single-store owners, its sweet spot is enterprises with 3-100 locations servicing 20+ brands, said Schmaltz.
“These organizations face the most complexity of systems, teams and have the highest stakes when it comes to brand-agnostic support.”
