Wins the $20,000 J. Terrell Brown Venture Challenge
From more than 60 entrants to first place: FarmSmart takes the $20,000 top prize at LSU's flagship startup competition.
BATON ROUGE, La. · FarmSmart won the 13th annual J. Terrell Brown Venture Challenge, the business plan competition run by LSU's Stephenson Entrepreneurship Institute, and its $20,000 first prize. It was the company's first competition win, and the first outside validation that a class project could be a business.
The founders were three engineering students: Colin Raby (mechanical), Grant Muslow (computer science and computer engineering) and Julius Pallotta (biological engineering). Raby entered after spotting a Venture Challenge poster in the business school. The team had a week to make a two-minute video, shot in an LSU AgCenter greenhouse, laying out the problem: each year the AgCenter updates a 500-plus-page manual of farming best practices alongside thousands of research articles, and finding the right advice is like looking for a needle in a haystack. FarmSmart's answer was an AI that turns all of it into actionable recommendations in seconds, not the weeks traditional consulting can take.
More than 60 teams applied; FarmSmart was one of 13 semifinalists asked for an executive business plan, then one of three finalists to pitch live to the judges."We were engineering students, not MBA graduates," Raby told LSU Innovation. The LSU Small Business Development Center helped the team pressure-test its business plan and financial projections.
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