Tule

Overview

Tule Technologies was a precision irrigation startup founded in 2013 by Tom Shapland, a UC Davis viticulture and agronomy PhD, and later joined by co-founder Jeff LaBarge. The company built the only commercially available hardware sensor for measuring Actual Evapotranspiration (ETa) — the real water use of a farm field — and participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2014 batch. Based in Davis, California, Tule expanded from hardware into software (FieldStat) and eventually AI (Tule Vision, a computer vision app for measuring vine water stress), serving high-value specialty crop growers in California's vineyards and tree nut orchards.^[1][2]

Tule's failure as a venture-backed company was not a product failure — it was a capital structure failure. The company built scientifically rigorous, hardware-dependent technology that was too capital-intensive to scale to venture returns in a niche market. When the next funding round failed to materialize, Shapland pivoted Tule into a profitable "lifestyle business" before CropX acquired it in January 2023, valuing Tule's canopy data as a complement to its own soil sensors rather than as a standalone product.^[3][4]

The acquisition marked the end of Tule's independent run but not its technology's life: CropX folded Tule's FieldStat into its platform as the "ET Index," enhanced with a neural network, and all Tule employees joined the acquirer.^[5]

Image 1 / 2

Founding Story

Tom Shapland's path to Tule began in the vineyards of UC Davis, where he earned a BS in Viticulture and Enology and a Doctorate in Horticulture and Agronomy. During his PhD work, he developed the underlying evapotranspiration (ET) measurement technology that would become Tule's core product — a method for measuring the actual water use of a farm field using a surface renewal energy balance approach.^[2]

The founding story is unusual in that Shapland's initial attempts to build the company failed at every conventional step. He couldn't find a co-founder, investors, or employees. The breakthrough came not from a pitch deck or a prototype, but from farmer commitments. Shapland told the Way of Product podcast: "Traction unblocks everything. Sales unblocks everything. As soon as I got a bunch of farmers to agree to sign up to use it, even though I didn't have a product yet, they were like, yeah, build it and I'll pay for it. Then everything fell into place."^[3]

Only after securing those farmer commitments was Shapland able to recruit Jeff LaBarge, a friend who had initially declined to work with him, to join as co-founder and CTO.^[3] Tule entered Y Combinator's Summer 2014 batch with a team of eight, raising a seed round that sources place at either $120K or $600K, with investors including Omron Ventures and 500 Startups.^[1][6][7]

Shapland's reflection on the early days reveals a founder who understood that his advantage was not experience but its absence. He told Way of Product: "The secret sauce I had is what every first-time founder has, and that is naivete. You just don't know how hard it's going to be. The challenge for my second time, for the second company I started, that naivete just isn't. Mostly, I look at the task and think, oh man, it's so hard and there's so much luck involved."^[3]