Sep 6, 2018

Sentera investment to boost adoption of drone provider’s wares

Sentera, a Minneapolis-based digital agriculture technology provider, has raised an additional $14 million in Series A funding. A premier group of food, biosciences, and agriculture investment firms, Chicago-based S2G Ventures, New York-based Continental Grain Co., and Washington, DC-based Middleland Capital, lead Sentera’s new funding group.

“Sentera has seen outstanding customer traction with our real-time digital analytics, sensors, and data platform. That has translated to accelerating commercial and enterprise customer and revenue growth,” said Eric Taipale, Sentera’s CEO. “We’ve built a very powerful capability but we’ve also been intensely focused on building a product that is easy to use and incorporate into existing workflows. That’s helped us establish confidence and trust with our customers. We’ve demonstrated how real-time sensing and analytics can improve economic outcomes and support sustainability initiatives. This investment allows us to ramp so we can take these digital products to scale more quickly, alongside the growers, advisors, and enterprise partners who’ve helped us to develop and refine our products.”

Sentera’s sensors and AI technology help to rapidly detect nutrition, disease, and plant status issues, in applications ranging from corn and soybeans to vegetables, fruit, and nuts. Deep learning and advanced computer vision algorithms integrate seamlessly with mobile, sensor, and cloud components to deliver immediate insights to growers, agronomists, and operators. Sentera information integrates directly with most integrated data management platforms, including John Deere Operations Center and Climate FieldView.

“We invest in teams that share our vision in building a food system designed for the 21st century and beyond. We are incredibly excited about Sentera’s people, their core technology, and their commercial success,” said Sanjeev Krishnan, managing director at S2G Ventures. “Sentera’s products have had very positive user feedback. The company can demonstrate that they improve customer profitability and that their technologies support new practices that drive greater efficiency while reducing environmental impact.”

Sentera has more than 1,000 North American reseller locations and additional customers, partners, and resellers around the world.  Sentera products are in use in more than 50 countries, on millions of acres, and within nearly 100 research universities worldwide.

Founded in 2014, Sentera is a lsupplier of integrated remote sensing, analytics, and IoT solutions to the digital agriculture marketplace. Sentera’s products make it easy for users to integrate in-field real-time data insights with the digital ag platforms in use by more than 80% of the growers in North America. Sentera’s equipment has flown tens of millions of acres all over the world, and the company processes manages many terabytes of new data for its customers every year. For more information, visit www.sentera.com.