Every ten minutes, a sensor in an almond orchard sends Michael Gilbert's company a reading.
By 2020, Semios had more than a million such sensors in the field and was collecting about 350 million data points a day. It managed more than 150,000 acres, including over 500 farms in the United States. Gilbert, a doctor of philosophy by title and the company's founder and chief executive, started it in Vancouver in 2010.
The idea was to treat a tree crop like an industrial process. Sensors track temperature, moisture and pests; software tells the grower when to irrigate, when frost is coming, and when to deploy pheromone-based pest control instead of blanket spraying. Growers pay a subscription, which means Semios earns only if the farmer keeps renewing.
That is a hard business to start. Farmers are cautious and hardware breaks outdoors. Funding came late. In 2016, Reid Carter, who had headed Brookfield's timberland investment arm, led a C$8m seed with other individuals, and the Canadian government added C$950,000. Then growth took off. Gilbert's company has said revenue roughly doubled each year on average from 2015.
That opened the door to bigger cheques. In February 2020, Morningside Group led a US$75m round, bringing total external capital to US$115m. A US$25m loan from CIBC Innovation Banking followed that March. In 2021 came US$100m more, and the company bought the farm-software firm Agworld.
The cost of scale is that Semios is now in the business of keeping sensors alive across thousands of kilometres of trees, and the company keeps its revenue and profit private.
The company has also been named to the Global Cleantech 100 list since 2018, a sign that outside judges noticed the model before the revenue figures were public.
The lesson is in the subscription. Semios did not sell a gadget; it sold a growing season's worth of reassurance, and every grower who renewed was a vote that the data paid for itself.