DARO, the Nebraska-based agtech startup working on swine illness detection, announced the closing of a $2.5 million funding round led by Grit Road Partners and co-led by Invest Nebraska and Nelnet. All three top funders are Nebraska-based.

The round follows on a $1.1 million seed raise from early 2025 and will help DARO expand capacity for and refine its patent-pending disease testing and diagnostic technology.

“This investment allows us to scale the laboratory, data and commercial systems behind DARO so more producers can use routine, whole-herd surveillance to gain time when disease emerges,” said Kristen Bernhard, founder and CEO of DARO, in a press release.

Like many of the Nebraska agtech startups now finding success, DARO is part of a crop of companies that were incubated at The Combine, the joint venture between Invest Nebraska, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and its Nebraska Innovation Campus.

Nebraska has about 3.5 million pigs as of March 2025 and a 2022 report showed the state’s swine market is its third largest agriculture product market by sales. Nebraska also contributed about $2 billion of the United States’ total $36.4 billion in hog sales in 2022, ranking fifth in the nation.

But over the last few decades, as it has grown, the swine industry has been squeezed by diseases. Just one, the porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV), costs the industry an estimated $1.2 billion per year. That’s an 80% increase from the mid-2000s.

PRRSV is the primary focus for DARO’s technology, while the startup also works on testing capacity for other diseases like porcine epidemic diarrhea virus.

“What has changed for DARO over the last year is the level of adoption we are seeing across the swine industry,” said Josh DeMers, co-founder and COO of DARO. “Our focus now is execution: increasing capacity, expanding the pathogens we can detect and making DARO easier to deploy across large production systems.”

For agtech funders like Mike Jung, the managing partner at Grit Road Partners, investing in DARO is shoring up the U.S. agriculture industry and solving a real problem for producers.

“Kristen, Josh, and the DARO team are fundamentally changing how the livestock industry approaches disease management,” Jung said, “by turning surveillance from a reactive test into a proactive, whole-herd intelligence tool.”