CEO Mackenzie Burnett talks to Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle about what it really took to build Ambrook.
Farmers see about 5 cents of every food dollar spent in America. More than 300 farms filed for bankruptcy in 2025, a 46% increase from the year before. When Ambrook’s first customers signed up, half of them were still managing their finances on pen and paper.
The fact that America’s producers have long made corporate-level decisions on paper ledgers and instinct alone speaks to their dedication and insight, as well as reveals an enormous opportunity: give them the tools corporations have always had, and the gains ripple outward to families, communities and the nation.
“It is both brutally hard and still a choice people make every day to show up,” Burnett told Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle on the Term Sheet podcast. “They’re doing it for the love of the game as much as anything.”
Running a farm means managing complexity that most businesses never face. Farms have multiple enterprises, seasonal cash flows, federal compliance and programs and complex family ownership structures. The problem was never the farmer. “It’s not because they’re bad at running the business,” Burnett said. “It’s that it is a complicated business to run, and there is no software that does it well yet.”
So Burnett and the Ambrook team set out to build a solution that would enable producers to quickly understand their full financial picture, but trust had to come before anything else.
It took three years to earn 30 customers. The first 15 were onboarded in person. This took a connecting flight to a regional airport, a two-hour drive, sitting down together at a computer and moving the farm onto Ambrook by hand. One customer came after a team member cold-called their way to a farm in Hawaii; Burnett had promised the whole team a retreat there if they pulled it off. They did.
“It wasn’t glamorous,” Burnett said, but it was essential. Those early conversations with producers discussing the exact workflows needed and building the entire platform to match the reality of an operation, shaped everything about what Ambrook became.
Today, more than 7,000 businesses in the real economy use the platform across all 50 states.
Burnett describes Ambrook’s customers as, “More resilient and more fragile than people may appreciate.” Commodity prices cycle. Weather wipes seasons. Fertilizer costs spike with geopolitical shocks half a world away. Farmers plan in the good times for the bad times; they always have. What Ambrook offers is the real-time visibility to do that planning with clear numbers instead of gut feelings.
As these business owners diversify and build for resilience, Ambrook gives them an easy on-ramp to understanding their financials at the unit level that drives decisions.
“The beauty of software is that you can pick those types of problems and make things easier,” Burnett said. “If I can play a small part in helping folks live the types of lives that they want to live, then I will be very happy.”
That’s the question driving Ambrook: How do we help build a more prosperous and resilient America? It starts with giving the people who run our farms, ranches and real businesses the tools to know their numbers, make confident decisions and build for the future.
