By Brady Drake | Photos provided by Lisa Kosciuk
By the time a coffee bean reaches a roaster, its physical journey may be relatively easy to imagine. Its informational journey is another matter.
The farm location can live in one system. The lot number can sit in a spreadsheet. Quality results may be recorded on paper. Certification documents arrive by email. Purchase agreements, delivery records, and shipping documents are managed by different companies using different tools. When a buyer, auditor, or regulator asks a question, someone must reconstruct the history by hand.
The information exists. The problem is that it rarely exists together.
That is the gap Verdethos was created to close.
The Fargo-based company is developing a cloud platform that connects the data and workflows used by producers, cooperatives, processors, trading companies and buyers. Instead of treating each organization as a separate island, Verdethos is designed to preserve the relationships, transactions, permissions and evidence that connect a raw agricultural product to its eventual destination.
Founder Lisa Kosciuk has an even simpler explanation.
“We basically get agribusiness and energy companies to stop emailing Excel spreadsheets back and forth,” she said.
The industry has invested heavily in equipment, automation, genetics, logistics and production technology. Yet many of the most consequential decisions made between companies still depend on spreadsheets, inboxes, handwritten notes and software systems built to perform one narrow function. Verdethos is focused on the work that happens in the gaps—after a crop leaves one party and before the next party can confidently say what it received.
A System For The Work Between Companies
Verdethos is often described as a traceability platform, but Kosciuk sees traceability as one outcome of a much larger job.
The platform is intended to connect the people responsible for sourcing, trading, procurement, operations, quality, logistics, sustainability, and compliance. External partners can participate in the same permissioned network, with each business deciding what its employees can access, which information can be shared outside the company, and what rules should govern a workflow.
Its current capabilities are related to supplier mapping, environmental monitoring, material ledgers, quality and grading, contracts, orders, shipping, customer portals, and product storytelling. Companies can begin with a limited portion of the platform rather than attempting a complete digital overhaul at once, and Verdethos is designed to integrate with existing enterprise and accounting systems.
Verdethos is not asking a processor to discard every tool it already uses. It is trying to create continuity between those tools—and between the companies on either side of a transaction.
Kosciuk used palm oil to explain what that continuity can look like. A refinery may receive material from mills, which receive fruit from estates, cooperatives, dealers and individual growers. That oil may later be refined, separated, mixed, sold, shipped and incorporated into thousands of consumer products.
Verdethos can map the businesses supplying each processor and maintain profiles containing details such as certifications, relationships and business information. Its chain-of-custody functions are designed to follow material as it is processed, divided, or combined, preserving records associated with each step. A buyer could then review the documents, certifications, and contributing materials connected to a shipment, subject to the permissions established by the companies involved.
A supply chain does not simply need a map. It needs a memory.
That is more than placing a pin on a map.
Static traceability can show where a commodity originated and which organizations participated in the chain. Transactional traceability must show what happened to the material, when it happened, who recorded it, and how the final quantity relates to what entered the system.
Traceability: Terms To Know
- Traceability: The ability to identify where a product or material came from and the organizations involved in its journey.
- Static Traceability: A map of the relationships among producers, suppliers, processors and other supply-chain participants.
- Transactional Traceability: A record of what happened to a particular material as it was purchased, transported, processed, divided, blended or sold.
- Chain Of Custody: Documentation showing who controlled or handled a material at each stage of the supply chain.
- Identity-Preserved Material: A commodity kept separate because it has specific characteristics, such as being organic, non-GMO, specialty-grown or produced under a particular certification.
“We basically get agribusiness and energy companies to stop emailing Excel spreadsheets back and forth.”
Lisa Kosciuk
A Different Route Into Agriculture
Kosciuk did not grow up expecting to build agricultural technology.
She entered the financial industry in part because she wanted to repay her student loans quickly. She discovered that she enjoyed working with people, understood numbers, and had a talent for operations. Twelve years later, she was managing operations at a large investment firm.
The work provided a career, but not the sense of purpose she was beginning to seek.
After the death of her husband, Chris, Kosciuk began reconsidering how she wanted to spend the rest of her working life. She joined Remote Year, a program that allowed a group of remote professionals to live and work in a different city each month. During 2018 and 2019, she traveled across Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
She was not content to experience those places only through coworking spaces and city centers. Kosciuk rented mopeds, found local guides and traveled into rural communities. She watched families grow, harvest, mill and deliver palm fruit, rice, corn, pineapples and other crops. She saw producers operating within economic systems that were far more complicated than the language of sustainability programs sometimes acknowledged.
In some communities, clearing nearby forest appeared to be the most direct way for a family to increase production and income. Elsewhere, people worried that they would eventually have to sell family land to a larger company simply to continue supporting themselves.
Those experiences changed the questions Kosciuk was asking.
Deforestation could not be understood only as an environmental data point. Traceability could not be reduced to a box that a buyer checked. Every map boundary, supplier classification, and compliance decision had the potential to affect a person’s livelihood.
When Kosciuk returned to the United States, she initially reentered finance. Then the pandemic pushed much of the professional world into remote work. She enrolled in a remote FinTech program through Columbia University, studying Python development, machine learning, database management, and blockchain.
There, she met Aidan Dowdle. Dowdle had worked in commodity trading in Africa and understood global supply chains from the top down. Kosciuk had begun studying the same system from the bottom up. They spent roughly two years researching the industry and the problems they believed software could address. Kevin Zhu later joined the founding team as chief technology officer, bringing experience in payment and digital-wallet technology.
The company was built remotely before its founders had all met in person. What might once have appeared to be a disadvantage became part of Verdethos’s identity: a distributed team attempting to connect organizations spread across continents, time zones, and radically different operating environments.
The Moral Tension Inside Traceability
Some technology companies begin with a product and search for customers who need it. Verdethos has tried to begin with the people performing the work.
“Stay curious,” Kosciuk said when asked what she had learned from working across different countries and cultures. “The second we assume we know what our customers need, rather than taking the time to ask them about their most pressing pain points and ask good clarifying questions, we lose a pulse on the insights that shape our future.”
That curiosity is not just a product-development strategy. It is protection against unintended harm.
A system designed to prove that commodities are responsibly sourced can become a gatekeeping system when smaller producers cannot supply the expected documents, coordinates, or digital records. A rule intended to stop illegal land clearing can punish families who have little control over how boundaries were recorded or how land rights were formalized.
“The features we build to prevent things like illegal deforestation could cause families to lose their land if we’re not careful,” Kosciuk said. “Our team is made up of humans too, and we won’t get everything right, but the best we can do is listen well and build from there.”
Software companies are often rewarded for presenting certainty. Kosciuk is more interested in preserving context. Verdethos must help a buyer verify a claim without pretending that every farming system, land-tenure structure or commercial relationship operates the same way.
That requires more than technical knowledge. It requires trust from people who may have little reason to trust another platform created far from their communities.
Kosciuk said some of her most revealing conversations have taken place away from conference rooms.
“The most honest conversations I’ve had with people often were not in offices,” she said. “They involved cooking or sharing a meal together with people very different from myself in unexpected places.”
Those meals helped shape a platform intended to serve users ranging from farmers and truck drivers to traders, auditors, and corporate sustainability teams. Each person sees only one portion of the supply chain. Verdethos’s challenge is to connect those perspectives without flattening them.
“The features we build to prevent things like illegal deforestation could cause families to lose their land if we’re not careful.”
Lisa Kosciuk
Why Fargo?
Verdethos was not founded in Fargo, but the company eventually found a natural home here.
Kosciuk’s introduction to the region came through the Prairie Capital Summit and North Dakota’s entrepreneurial network. During an early visit, several people encouraged her to connect with Fargo-based agricultural technology company Bushel. Others warned that the companies might be competitors.
Meetings between the teams produced the opposite conclusion.
Bushel and Verdethos were concentrating on different portions of the agricultural supply chain, and Kosciuk saw more value in collaboration than territorial competition. People within Bushel became sounding boards as Verdethos refined its own market and platform.
The relationship also showed Kosciuk something about Fargo that she had not experienced in larger startup centers.
“I’ve lived in and visited many cities, and there are no other startup ecosystems that compare to what is here,” she said. “It is fascinating how well everyone works together here and partners and connects with little to no strings attached. That’s rare.”
Verdethos moved its headquarters from New York to Fargo in 2023. The Greater Fargo Moorhead Economic Development Corporation reported that its relationship with the company began in 2022 and eventually included assistance with a North Dakota LIFT loan and the state’s Angel Match Program. In May 2025, the North Dakota Department of Commerce approved $155,000 in Angel Match funding for Verdethos’s working capital.
The relocation was not merely a lifestyle choice.
Agriculture and energy are central to Verdethos’s strategy. The company’s publicly identified markets now include coffee, palm oil, soybeans, grains, paper and biofuels. Fargo places Verdethos near producers, commodity businesses, agricultural technology companies and energy interests while still allowing it to operate globally.
For Kosciuk, the region also offered something harder to quantify: people willing to make introductions before asking what they would receive in return.
That is meaningful to a company whose product depends on participation. A traceability network becomes more valuable as more supply-chain partners contribute reliable information. Verdethos is attempting to build software around the same collaborative behavior Kosciuk found in Fargo.
Four Forces Driving Better Traceability
- Regulation: Companies increasingly need evidence supporting claims about sourcing, land use and production practices.
- Customer Requirements: Large buyers and consumer brands are asking suppliers for more detailed information about ingredients and raw materials.
- Supply-Chain Risk: Connected data can help companies identify shortages, delays, quality problems or sourcing disruptions sooner.
- Chain Of Custody: Documentation showing who controlled or handled a material at each stage of the supply chain.
- Market Opportunity: Verified information may help producers and processors qualify for specialty markets, premiums, incentives or preferred-supplier programs.
The Compliance Deadline Is Becoming Real
The market for that collaboration is growing.
The European Union Deforestation Regulation requires businesses placing certain commodities and derived products on the European market to demonstrate that they were not produced on land deforested after December 31, 2020. The regulation covers cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soy and wood.
Following several revisions and delays, the regulation is scheduled to apply beginning December 30, 2026, for large and medium-sized operators and certain smaller companies. Most other micro and small operators are scheduled to follow on June 30, 2027.
For affected companies, compliance is not simply a matter of writing a policy. They must be able to connect products to production locations, evaluate risk, retain documentation, and provide evidence about the materials contained in a shipment. When those records are scattered among suppliers, departments, and disconnected systems, compliance becomes an expensive reconstruction project.
Verdethos’s opportunity is to turn that recurring burden into an operating system.
The same information used to respond to regulators can help companies identify supply disruptions, locate quality problems, communicate with buyers, evaluate suppliers, and understand what inventory is actually available. Traceability becomes more valuable when it is embedded in day-to-day transactions rather than assembled only when someone asks for proof.
The Greater Fargo Moorhead Economic Development Corporation reported in early 2026 that Verdethos was gaining traction in global coffee and palm-oil supply chains while exploring additional commodity applications connected to North Dakota.
That work is visible at the farm level. A public update from Verdethos’s Brazilian team described the beginning of a coffee harvest at Fazenda Nossa Senhora Aparecida in Campanha, Minas Gerais, with traceability incorporated into the process.
The distance between a North Dakota software company and a Brazilian coffee farm can appear enormous. Verdethos exists because the commercial distance between that farm and the final buyer is even larger.
Each organization needs different information. The farmer needs a workable process. The processor needs quality and delivery records. The exporter needs shipping documentation. The buyer needs confidence. The regulator needs evidence. None of them benefits when the same facts must be entered, emailed, interpreted, and verified repeatedly.
A Broader Definition Of Agricultural Leadership
Kosciuk’s path challenges a narrow idea of who belongs in agriculture.
She did not enter the industry through a family farm, an agronomy program or a traditional commodity company. She arrived through financial operations, international travel, software education, and persistent questions about why global systems work the way they do.
That route is increasingly important. Agriculture needs people who understand soil, plants, animals and machinery. It also needs people who can connect the field to contracts, markets, transportation, software and regulation. Many of the industry’s hardest problems now live between disciplines—and between organizations.
Kosciuk’s work sits inside those intersections.
Her operational background taught her to notice repetitive work. Her financial experience taught her how companies evaluate risk and investment. Her travels taught her that an efficient system can still produce unfair outcomes. Her startup experience taught her how quickly information becomes unmanageable without deliberate processes.
Asked what advice she would give her younger self, Kosciuk did not offer a grand statement about courage or entrepreneurship.
“Operationalize whatever you can,” she said. “Have a process for everything that is repeatable and a way to categorize and organize information that you take in.”
That advice could also serve as Verdethos’s product philosophy. Agricultural supply chains contain enormous amounts of knowledge. Much of it is trapped inside the heads of experienced employees, the inboxes of individual traders, the spreadsheets maintained by one department or the paper records stored at one location. Verdethos is trying to make that knowledge durable.
Its success will not be measured only by the number of farms mapped or documents uploaded. The more meaningful test is whether a producer can participate without being buried in administrative work; whether a processor can make decisions without reconciling five versions of the same spreadsheet; whether a buyer can trust a claim without demanding that every company rebuild the evidence from the beginning.
The future of agricultural traceability may run on software.
Kosciuk’s wager is that it will still be built on trust.
From Field To Final Product
- 1. Farm Or Production Site: Location, producer information, crop type, harvest details and certifications are recorded.
- 2. First Buyer Or Aggregator: The crop may move through a cooperative, dealer, elevator or collection point. Quantity, ownership and delivery information are added.
- 3. Processor: The material may be cleaned, crushed, refined, blended, divided or otherwise transformed. Each event creates another record.
- 4. Trader Or Exporter: Contracts, shipping documents, inventory information and destination details follow the transaction.
- 5. Manufacturer: The agricultural ingredient becomes part of a food, fuel, personal-care product, building material or other finished good.
- 6. Buyer, Auditor Or Regulator: Permissioned users can review the records connected to the final shipment or product.
Verdethos | verdethos.io | LinkedIn
Read this story as it appears in the September/October issue:
More Women In Ag From This Issue
- Women In Ag: Finding Her Voice In The Blue Jacket
- Women In Ag: Small Machine, Big Hope
- Women In Ag: Rooted In Relationships
