Feed logistics company BinSentry will accelerate its global expansion after raising a $50 million Series C round, the company said this week.
The Ontario, Canada- and Austin, Texas-based company is well known in enterprise agriculture circles for its sensor tech and software platform that improve feed bin management and remove many of the associated manual tasks.
It will “expand pretty aggressively in North America and then the United States” thanks to the new funding, and the company also has a presence in Brazil, CEO Ben Allen tells AgFunderNews.
The Series C round—a hefty number for agtech startups nowadays—comes after “a couple of good years” for the BinSentry.
“We’re completing our third year of greater than 100% growth year on year. We’ve been at least doubling every year for the last three. We’ve also seen pretty aggressive gross margin accretion.”
He says the company has also maintained a 0% customer churn rate since it first released a commercial product five years ago.
New York-based Lead Edge Capital led the Series C round, and Lead Edge operating partner Paul Bell will join BinSentry’s board of directors. Other investors are not disclosed at this time.
And while he won’t state exact numbers, Allen notes that the company’s performance gets better and better as it scales. “We’re an industrial IoT company, and industrial IoT companies do best at industrial scale.”
How it works
Effective feed bin management at the scale of industrial agriculture is all about monitoring feed levels in real time, preventing spoilage from contamination or pests, and accurately tracking feed inventory to reduce waste.
BinSentry promises these benefits via its solar-powered, self-cleaning in-bin sensors that use machine imaging technology to provide 3D images of feed surfaces to users. Operators can then access these images remotely via a mobile dashboard to better forecast demand and reduce waste.
The company—which focuses on enterprise-sized agribusiness clients—has attracted a number of big-names including Wayne-Sanderson Farms, Hanor, and Cargill. The latter struck a deal with BinSentry this past February that makes Cargill the exclusive distributor of of BinSentry’s platform in Brazil.
Improving feed logistics with AI, automation
The United States sells more than $100 billion of animal feed annually, says Allen. But up to now, the feed logistics market has been underserved when it comes to technology.
“There just haven’t been a lot of good solutions previous to our efforts. Companies that we serve are feeding the world on a daily basis, and they do it with a lot of work behind the scenes, and our automation and our use of AI really helps them scale and be more efficient and be safer with their employee base.”
He says there are a few things driving more adoption of feed logistics tech in agriculture nowadays. For one thing, the technology has simply gotten better around this particular use case.
Animal feed is difficult to measure because it doesn’t sit in the bin as something like sand would. Weather, moisture content, even type of feed can vary the way the feed piles up in the bin.
Even so, “You have to be able to map the internal surface of the inventory to be highly accurate,” says Allen. “That’s something we’ve pioneered over the last three to four years, and we’re leaders in it. Using AI inside of the firmware in our hardware is the unique way that we go about that.”
Labor—or lack thereof—is another driver for BinSentry’s tech, particularly when it comes to the automation aspect, he adds. Since BinSentry’s system offers remote monitoring of the bins, there’s less need for someone to climb a ladder and manually look inside a bin.
Automation also addresses the safety concerns around bin management. In many cases, manual inventory checks involve a human climbing the bin ladder, opening the top hatch of the bin and peering in to, says Allen, “try and guess” at the inventory.
“That involves a lot of ladder climbing in all kinds of weather, and falls are the number one cause of accidents in agriculture. Having a human climb a ladder and risking potential injury in exchange for eyeballing inventory in a dark bin is a bad safety tradeoff.”
“With our, with our hardware and software combination, you just don’t need to risk that,” he adds.
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