Sentera, the agricultural drone and data-analysis software firm that recently raised an inaugural round of equity capital from institutional investors, is building its management team.
"Our business has grown significantly every year," CEO Eric Taipale said this week.
Richfield-based Sentera partners with product distributors such as John Deere, the seed business of Bayer Crop Sciences and Land O'Lakes to get its technology to farmers. It describes itself as the leader of "real-time, in-season insights for digital agriculture."
Among the management additions:
• Joe Dunsmore, named Sentera's chief strategy officer, is a former CEO of "internet-of-things" communication-device firm Digi International and has worked at Lucent, USRobotics and AT&T.
• Dan Gray has joined Sentera as chief growth officer, responsible for the company's sales and its interface with product planning, life cycle support and customer success. Gray was previously the senior vice president of global sales and marketing for animal nutrition at QualiTech.
• John Hudson, named Sentera's chief operating officer, is responsible for finance, HR, production, operations and information technology. He was CFO for Syngenta North America Seeds.
"We still build sensors, but we have pivoted hard into machine learning and data sciences to take the data off those sensors and help the customers make use of it," Taipale said. "We count plants, find weeds and predict yields, look at disease and nutrition. A couple years ago the customers would have had to determine that from the imagery. We now provide the value-added data analysis," he said.
