Rob Leclerc has the kind of pedigree that investors tend to like. He has a masters degree in computer science from the University of Calgary and a PhD in computational biology from Yale. In fact, ten years ago, what he really wanted to do with his degrees was to find and fund agriculture-related projects that tackle climate change.

But ten years ago, “agtech” wasn’t yet a category, and that was problematic when it came to pitching investors on the concept of an investment fund that Leclerc would run with partner Michael Dean, with whom Leclerc had previously operated an agribusiness in West Africa for several years.

At the time, “there were a handful of businesses” relating to agtech that investors were aware of, says Leclerc. Think Climate Corp and Impossible Foods and the smart machinery company Blue River. But Climate Corp hadn’t yet sold to Monsanto for $1 billion. Impossible Foods wasn’t valued in the billions of dollars, as it is today. And Blue River was still years away from its $305 million sale to John Deere. “The overarching problem was narrative,” Leclerc says. “People didn't care about it.”

He and Dean might have just given up; instead, they started a San Francisco-based content company called AgFunder News. “We thought if we could get people excited about food and [agriculture], maybe we'd be in a position to [raise a fund later],” says Leclerc. It was a smart bet. Fast forward and after posting more than 4,000 articles to the site and garnering 90,000 subscribers to the site’s weekly newsletter, Leclerc says AgFunder’s investment team – which now features four partners – just closed on $60 million in capital commitments for a new fund that they expect will reach $100 million over the next couple of months if things go their way.

It’s a huge step up from previous funds that Leclerc and company began raising several years ago – beginning with their newsletter readers. “We first raised a $2.5 million friends-and-family fund,” he says, “but then five months later, we needed more money, so we raised $2 million, then six months later, we raised $5 million.” And so on. It wasn’t the most conventional way to raise money, but AgFunder had this “massive subscriber base" to which it could talk directly about its fundraising efforts, says Leclerc, “and the belief that we know what we’re doing and can spot companies started a lot of conversations that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. It became a structural advantage.”