DECEMBER 2019 • COUNTRY LIFE IN BC


BC agritech attracting


major partners Lower Mainland companies share expertise in securing capital by PETER MITHAM VANCOUVER –


Technological innovation is on the rise as a way to address the labour shortages facing agriculture and improve production practices, but getting the money to fund research and development activities is tough. To give companies a chance to share their successes with emerging companies on the hunt for cash, the Vantec Angel Network Inc. hosted an information and networking session for local agritech companies on November 6. A centrepiece of the


afternoon event was a panel discussion with Tom Urban, founder of Agribusiness Advisors, a Vancouver company that has provided early stage financing to several agritech companies. The panel included three of those companies: CubicFarm Systems Inc., a four-year-old vertical farming company spun out of the Benne family’s greenhouse business in Langley; Novobind Livestock Therapeutics Inc. of Vancouver, which focuses on technologies that reduce antimicrobial use in animals; and SemiosBio Technologies Inc., also of Vancouver, which has patented an automated monitoring system to reduce the use of chemical pest controls in orchards.


Semios has been the most successful of the three companies to date, securing $100 million in financing in September that will support expansion into new markets with its automated


monitoring system, which can also track climatic conditions. It currently serves growers managing 120,000 acres, an area that’s set to grow in 2020. “I founded the company in 2011 and the first three to four years were pretty much research years,” says Semios CEO Michael Gilbert. “Then we focused a lot on profitability. We were trying to see how fast could we grow and still become profitable. So trying to max out those two; often people pick one or the other.” The company raised $28 million from investors and $20 million from grants and other sources prior to licensing its technology to growers for an annual fee of $100 to $300 per acre. “One thing we did early on


is we went right to the biggest, best customers in the world … in California and Washington,” explains Gilbert. “There’s lots of folks here in BC we could have gone after, but the big customers tell you everything you need to know about your business and that helped us learn a lot about the product really quickly.” Profitability was key, so


growers weren’t given free trials or discounts. “People care more when


they pay … and that allowed us to get to profitability much faster,” he says. Urban says by showing customers the economic impact of their product, Semios fueled its own success. “They were able to demonstrate a very specific value/economic proposition to the customer,” he notes.


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Semios CEO Michael Gilbert focused on profitability to attract investors to his company, which licenses crop monitoring systems to manage more than 120,000 acres. SUBMITTED PHOTO


Established record The value of the enclosed


vertical farming systems CubicFarms offers was clear to many of its early investors because the Benne family was respected across the continent for its greenhouse propagation systems and had an established record on the public markets through Bevo Agro Inc. (which last year evolved into cannabis producer Zenabis Global Inc.). “Everyone else in the indoor ag space seems to be more coming at it from a business plan, let’s raise a


bunch of capital and solve great problems with the sheer brute force of money,” explains CEO Dave Dinesen, who joined the company last year. “Our founders came at it from ‘We’re really good growers; we’re going to come at it from the grower’s standpoint.’” Created in 2014,


CubicFarms steadily grew with the assistance of four rounds of financing, each larger than the last until it secured a $100 million investment last year backed by an institutional investor and was spun out of Bevo.


“It was a combination of we


know how to grow stuff, and we’ve got a competent management team that knows how to scale up, raise capital, execute, build a team,” says Dinesen, who adds that sales didn’t hurt. While it has not released


any financials since being spun out of Bevo last year, it has made major sales to growers in Canada and the US; the latter was worth nearly $4 million. It also sells produce under the Thriiv brand name through IGA, Kin’s Farm


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