Landscaping might not sound like a tech revolution, until you meet the team that just turned your backyard into a dataset and your design vision into a drag-and-drop experience.
Duranta, the Seattle-based SaaS startup built by the engineering crew behind Aurora Solar, just closed a $7M seed round led by Base10 Partners. Pear VC, Coalition Operators, and Sunshine Lake Ventures joined the party, with angels like GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke and PagerDuty co-founder Andrew Miklas putting their chips on the table. That’s not a cap table, it’s a résumé of people who’ve seen the movie and know how it ends.
Let’s talk brains behind the build. Co-founder and CEO Samuel Adeyemo is no rookie. After co-founding Aurora Solar (yes, that one) and navigating the high-stakes world of JPMorgan’s CIO office, he’s now making landscaping look more like logistics meets machine learning. And Alex Besogonov, Duranta’s Co-founder and CTO, quietly codes like a sniper. Ex-Aurora, deep open source contributor, this guy doesn’t just ship product, he defines categories.
Duranta’s platform isn’t window dressing. It’s a full-blown AI-powered operating system for landscapers and lawn care operators. From aerial lot measurement with their proprietary CV engine AIdan, to 3D design tools, to instant proposals, CRM, scheduling, invoicing, and QuickBooks Online sync, the product is built for contractors who’d rather run jobs than run paperwork.
But don’t mistake “landscaping” for niche. The U.S. landscaping services market is $184B deep with over 600,000 businesses. It’s one of the most fragmented industries in North America. Duranta saw the inefficiency, dropped in with remote property measurement, automated takeoffs, and e-signature tracking, and cut estimating time from hours to minutes. That’s not incremental. That’s a seismic shift in how the green industry operates.
Early traction? Already landing paying customers in multiple states. Team size? Sixteen, and scaling hard. Hiring? Senior engineers, product designers, computer vision talent, go-to-market leads, if you’re a builder who likes building with real stakes, this isn’t a drill. The roadmap includes robotic mower integrations, snow and irrigation templates, fleet routing, and a native iPad app, all by 2026. The future of outdoor projects? Yeah, it’s already rendering in Duranta’s interface.
Duranta didn’t just raise capital. They raised expectations, for what a vertical SaaS can do when it doesn’t just chase a market, but understands the operators inside it. Samuel Adeyemo and Alex Besogonov saw a $184B analog problem, and they’re solving it with cloud-native precision. The name might sound botanical, but make no mistake, this is some heavy-duty infrastructure for the landscaping world.
The lawn may be green, but Duranta just made it smart.
