Split a whole local animal with your neighbors. No shipping, no markup, no chest freezer.
A hyper-local group-buying marketplace for farm-direct meat. Neighbors form pools to split a verified local farm’s whole animal, fund it through a transparent credit ledger, and pick it up locally. Pre-launch. Built. Live waitlist at homegraze.com.
A quarter cow is over 100 pounds of frozen meat: a chest freezer, a budget commitment, and more than most households can use. Local farms have demand. Buyers want traceable, local protein. But finding the farm, sending a deposit months ahead, and coordinating pickup kills the deal.
A pool removes both frictions at once. Each household takes ten to thirty pounds instead of a quarter cow, and one captain handles the deposit and the pickup for the whole group, so the farm sees funded demand before it allocates an animal.
Crowd Cow validated in 2015 that consumers will pool to buy a whole animal. Then they pivoted to a shipped, curated national marketplace and abandoned the pooling mechanic. The local community-buy niche they proved and vacated is what HomeGraze is reviving.
Supply-side software (Barn2Door, GrazeCart, Local Line) makes each farm a better island. Demand-side DTC players (ButcherBox, Crowd Cow, Moink) ship marked-up boxes nationally. Neither aggregates local demand. HomeGraze does.
The same pound of beef, bought two ways. The cold-chain cost alone is the structural edge.
Sourcing
National shipped DTCAggregated, anonymized, often imported
HomeGraze poolOne verified local farm, named, visited
Cold-chain shipping cost
National shipped DTC$10 to $30 per box, structural
HomeGraze pool$0. Local pickup.
Curated markup
National shipped DTC$1.50 to $3.00 per pound vs farm-direct
HomeGraze poolPass-through farm price. Transparent service fee on top.
Volume commitment
National shipped DTCSubscription box, 5 to 10 lb a month
HomeGraze poolPool share sized to fit a normal freezer, 10 to 30 lb
Who you know
National shipped DTCThe brand, not the farmer
HomeGraze poolThe farmer, by name. And the neighbors at pickup.
Sources: 2024 to 2026 DTC meat market analyses, ButcherBox, Crowd Cow and Moink pricing breakdowns, and farm-direct case studies. References slide in the deck appendix.
Four things a national storefront cannot copy once one metro is dense. The fourth is the framing we put in front of investors.
Once a metro has enough verified farms and enough active pools, it becomes the obvious place for both sides to be. That density is hard to replicate and self-reinforces. Protect it by going deep in one region before going wide. This is the real moat.
Each pool is a community ritual, the Table. A captain who rallies neighbors every season is a customer-acquisition and retention loop a national storefront cannot copy. Invites are the lowest-cost channel and they are built into the product.
The internal credit ledger lets buyers see exactly what they have funded and lets farms see real demand before they allocate an animal. Combined with farm verification and reputation, this is what keeps both sides on the platform.
We are not pitching an AI moat or proprietary algorithms. The codebase is well built, but the defensibility is the network we are about to assemble. Marketplaces are won by the first team to get a region dense. That is where the use of funds goes.
Farms pay for filled demand. Buyers pay a disclosed fee on the pool. The price of the animal passes through untouched.
Farms pay for filled demand they did not have to market for. Comparable to Barn2Door’s range. The farm keeps every cent of the meat price the buyer pays.
Disclosed up front in the pool ledger. Covers escrow, dispute resolution, captain tools, and the pickup-event coordination. Transparent, not a markup.
Recurring pools, analytics, priority placement, multi-pool dashboards. The Pro tier for the captains and farms running the most volume.
The internal pool credit ledger is non-transferable and purchase-locked. It exists to give buyers a transparent view of what they have funded, not as a token or stored value.
HomeGraze is a marketplace and community network play, not a deep-tech play. The defensibility is local liquidity, community lock-in, and the trust ledger. Investors who fund marketplaces on evidence of liquidity will recognize the playbook.
Priced or SAFE at $6M pre-money. Approximately 20 percent post-money equity. Standard pre-seed terms. Single lead at $500K to $1M plus a syndicate. No board seat at this round size. Pro rata rights for the lead.
Funds the launch region completely: lighthouse farms, captain recruitment, regulatory and legal, pickup logistics, two named hires. Target: 100 funded pools and about $1M GMV by month 12. That is the liquidity proof a seed round wants.
The deck includes the sourced market data, the honest Crowd Cow whitespace framing, the competitive map across farm-direct software and DTC meat players, the marketplace moat, the unit economics per pool and per region, the founder bio, the use of funds, and the term sheet structure.
The sourced market data: $5.9B in 2024 to $18B by 2033.
The Crowd Cow framing, stated honestly: the pool was proven in 2015 and then abandoned.
The map across farm-direct software and the national DTC meat players.
Local liquidity, community lock-in, and the credit ledger.
Per pool and per region.
Background and the products already shipped and operated.
Where the $1.5M goes over twelve months, line by line.
The term sheet structure for a $6M pre-money pre-seed.
We are running this raise out of ATERNA Labs. We prefer a single lead partner of $500K to $1M plus a small syndicate for the remainder. On the call we walk the term sheet, the launch-region selection rationale, and the regulatory model.