Transaction Overview
- Advised Sentera in acquiring funding from S2G Ventures, Continental Grain Company, and others.
- Founded in 2014 and based in Minneapolis, MN, Sentera is a supplier of integrated remote sensing software and analytics to the agriculture industry, making it easy for users to make on-field real-time decisions through their digital platform. By integrating drone, sensors and proprietary software and analytics through an end-to-end insights platform, Sentera delivers actionable work orders that are seamless, timely and easy-to-use. These task orders support in-season management and execution of weed, disease and pest pressure mitigation and nutrition strategies. By optimizing the decision-making process, Sentera contributes to the sustainability of agriculture practices, allowing for site-specific fertilizer, pesticide applications as well as conservation of water usage.
- Multiple parties participated in the funding round for Sentera.
Key Observations
- Sentera’s data and analytics products are different and complementary to “Big Data” analytics provided by large digital ag platforms. Instead of planning based around analysis of massed accumulated data, Sentera’s analytics focus on real-time measurement, assessment, and notification of measures of in-field status. Sentera technology operates in-field to produce time sensitive data that indicates an acute condition or instantaneous measure of status, while contributing information that supports refinement of the risk profile targeted by Big Data.
- Current practices dramatically under-sample data and are inaccurate. Standard practice is to travel to a small number of disparate point locations in a field and extrapolate these results to the whole field. As data is expensive to collect, advisors can only afford to take a few samples, and are forced to extrapolate very small sample sizes to the entire field which leads to data inaccuracy.