Semios Adds Frost Automation with Altrac Acquisition

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Precision agriculture provider Semios continues their focus on permanent crops like almonds, pistachios, apples, cherries, grapes, and citrus. Their growth has come partially as a result of listening to customers, says founder and CEO Michael Gilbert.

Gilbert… “We're first focused a lot on insect or pest management and to some extent frost management. And several of our larger customers were showing us other companies they liked that they would love to see integrated into a single platform. And so we started looking at that ecosystem and are trying to enable that through both partnerships and acquisitions.”

One of those acquisitions, which came from an existing partnership, was Altrac, which Semios acquired in June.

Gilbert… “Altrac focuses on automation in general, they had a really well commercialized wind machine control system. They also do irrigation control and pump control, and now those are coming to market. But to start, we understand kind of by the acre, where's your frost risk, when's it developing. And then we can couple that with essentially now, remotely starting and stopping those wind machines.”

Gilbert says their customers continue to give them feature requests to build into the Semios platform, and this will continue to direct their growth either through development or acquisition.