Nathan Hoel (BCS’ 08) is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of ag-tech startup, BinSentry. Founded in 2017, BinSentry creates AI-sensors that can determine a feed bin’s inventory. The data is displayed on a dashboard, providing an accurate snapshot to poultry and hog farmers.
BinSentry has grown exponentially since its humble beginnings in a rented garage in New Hamburg. Now, it operates in a 11,000-square-foot office space in Downtown Kitchener’s Lang Tannery building, which is home to Communitech, one of Canada’s largest innovation hubs. It monitors more than 25,000 feed bins across North America and has entered the Brazilian market. The company continues to grow, as it recently acquired $15 million in Series B funding.
In this Q&A, Hoel discusses BinSentry’s cutting-edge technology, his entrepreneurship journey and love for the city of Waterloo, where he grew up in.
What problem is your company trying to solve and how?
Farmers put millions of dollars’ worth of animal feed into bins outside their barns— but they don’t know how much feed is inside them. They rely on archaic methods of throwing stones or climbing a ladder and banging a hammer, to see where the bin is hollow or full. People can seriously hurt themselves if they fall off these ladders, as they’re about 20 to 30 feet tall. At least one farmer dies every year from these falls.
Farmers guesstimate the feed amount and use that to run their entire production. There’s a lot of overhead in being wrong. For instance, some mills will send 40-tonne trucks four and five hours away to collect the feed. If they’re not filled up, then they lose money.
So, we created a 3D computer vision sensor that can identify what’s inside these containers. Other industries have made robots that use machine vision before, but not in this environment because it is too dusty and there are too many reflections. It felt so fulfilling because there was no handbook. We had to create something that hasn’t been done before.
What’s the journey behind BinSentry?
Our path isn’t normal. I know from judging pitch competitions that most entrepreneurs create a business to solve a problem that they deal with every day. Like a student built a complex alarm clock because they struggle with getting up for class. Rather, this idea fell into the founding team’s lap. One of the founders worked at a home automation company and met a farmer who asked, “How do I know what’s inside my bin? Is there a way to automate that?” His company wasn’t interested, so he asked his friends who worked in high-tech. We all thought this would be quick Google search, but none of the solutions did the full job.
At a conference, we posed a lot of questions to Wallenstein Feed and Supply, a local company. They asked us, “Why are you interested? Do you have a solution?” Before we could even answer they responded, “If you do, we will buy thousands of them.”
For many startups, the most difficult step is finding a committed buyer, yet we had one early on. I think many people want to reach perfection before they offer their product, but we recognized that you should take any opportunity no matter what stage you’re at— and that’s why BinSentry exists.
What does your daily work look like as a CTO? How has your role changed as your company grew?
At the beginning, my role was in programming and software architecture, with a little bit of product design. I managed one or two software developers, so I was more of a team lead than a CTO.
The journey of any founding executive, whether you’re the CEO or CTO, is that you’re constantly shedding and giving your tasks to others. I controlled the hardware and software products, but over time we hired someone to be the director. Now, they tell me what's going in hardware, and I would make the higher-level decisions, instead than doing all the hands-on stuff.
For any new founders, don’t let worrying about what you need to know in 5 years stop you. You can learn as you grow with the company. Focus on educating yourself and finding other experienced founders to coach you. The community in this area is great for that.
When you were an undergrad, how were you thinking about AI? What trends do you see in AI's application to industry?
AI has always been a thing, but it's undergone massive change since the 2000s and 2010s. I feel AI has almost become a buzzword— some companies are using AI as a tack-on or for reasons that are not valuable. It’s sort of like the dot-com boom, where companies would add “.com” to their names and see their value go up in billions.
I almost feel guilty using the word even though we really use AI. I feel more compelled to say that AI is real, but you need to be thoughtful about how you apply it. Not everything needs to be solved with AI.
What was the biggest challenge you faced as an entrepreneur? How did you overcome it?
It was the fear of running a startup. I had four kids when I started BinSentry, and leaving a regular job for a startup is risky. I remember waking up in cold sweat, thinking that I was crazy for quitting my job to work at BinSentry full-time. But then the grogginess would go away, and I would wake up thinking, “I’m doing this because I have a great opportunity.”
I think University of Waterloo students are really good at their jobs. Through the co-op program, they pick up a lot of skills and meet various people. So, if your venture fails, you'll always have a place to go back to. You will be in even more demand because you learned a lot from your entrepreneurship.
My advice for anyone interested in entrepreneurship is that you can still work a 9-to-5 job, start a family, and not give up on your idea. Some people think the only way to start a company is when you’re straight out of university because you have fewer bills to pay. But I think that’s source of a lot of failures because these founders have little real-world experience. It’s also important to hire people that you trust, and if you've never worked with anyone before, then your pool is limited. So, there’s a lot of advantage of starting a company in your thirties because you know what a good company looks like.
What made you stay in the Kitchener-Waterloo area rather than starting your business in the Greater Toronto Area or the United States?
A huge part of it is that we found a customer locally, since getting seed money is difficult.
For me, a huge archetype of what it means to start and keep a company in this area was Vidyard, founded by UW alumni Michael Litt (BASc ’11) and Devon Galloway (BASc ’10). When they were selected by Y Combinator, the world's most famous startup accelerator, they were considered crazy for moving back. But there’s a huge support network here, with multiple world-class startups and accelerators.
Now, they founded Garage Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage companies in the KW area. They even helped fund and coach BinSentry. When founders are successful and they exit their company, the next thing they want to do is invest in more startups. There’s this huge pay-it-forward movement in Waterloo. So, it makes it possible to start a company here because you can receive funding and advice.
There’s also world-class talent coming out of the University of Waterloo and hiring directly was a huge portion of our decision.
What do you hope to accomplish in the near future?
I have two pretty lofty goals. One is that I want to see how successful we can be, especially with such a small yet efficient team. We went from six to almost 100 employees. I also want to see more successful companies in the KW area. It’s almost like cheering for the home team, right? This city punches way above their weight class.