Granular material asteroids. Some examples of granular materials are snow, nuts, coal, sand, rice, coffee, corn flakes, fertilizer, and bearing balls. Research into granular materials is thus directly applicable and goes back at least to Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, whose law of friction was originally stated for granular materials. Granular materials are commercially important in applications as diverse as pharmaceutical industry, agriculture, and energy production. Powders are a special class of granular material due to their small particle size, which makes them more cohesive and more easily suspended in a gas. The soldier/physicist Brigadier Ralph Alger Bagnold was an early pioneer of the
Granular Inc. Granular Inc. Granular Inc. is a San Francisco-based company that develops and markets farm management software. The company's software allows farmers to manage operational and financial data on a single cloud and mobile platform. As of 2016, Granular raised $25 million in venture funding and acquired the farm valuation platform AcreValue. Granular is a spinoff of the company Solum, which was founded in 2009. In 2014, Monsanto acquired half of the business, which focused on soil testing and was merged with Climate Corp. The remaining half of the company was spun-off into Granular. After the split, Granular raised $4.2 million