Elevated Signals
Elevated Signals is a cannabis production SaaS company generating significant and growing monthly recurring revenue with small, medium, and enterprise customers including some of the largest producers in North America. They provide licensed operators with a user-friendly and robust manufacturing execution system (MES) that combines batch production, quality compliance, and environmental data into a single platform.
They are the only company that enables cannabis producers to track and automatically generate fully paperless, pharmaceutical-grade batch records as required by regulatory agencies. This provides customers with a 6x annual ROI on average versus the common approach of using outdated and cumbersome seed-to-sale inventory software combined with paper-based quality compliance records. Their software also ensures expedited regulatory agency audit reviews. These audits can make the critical difference between a cultivator ensuring compliance or risking regulatory violations that could slow down or stop operations.
Their competitors are primarily legacy seed-to-sale software companies that emerged from the original medical cannabis market. These competing companies focus exclusively on inventory accounting and, as a result, failed to keep up with the requirements of modern producers, who need integrated plant production, product manufacturing, and quality compliance systems that give them full visibility into operations and help them track and improve efficiency.
Traction
Elevated Signals has had a great year in 2020. Their monthly recurring revenue has increased 8 fold, with a growing pipeline in the Canadian market as well as internationally. They are signing new accounts every month, with a balance of new producers and rip-and-replacement of competitive software. Their current customers include top producers such as Tantalus Labs, Pure Sunfarms, Decibel, and Habitat Craft and their software helps manage production of almost 4 million square feet of canopy.
Due to COVID-19 there has been a lot of uncertainty for businesses with regard to fundraising, economic health, and workplace arrangements. Elevated Signals received their term sheet during the market crash and are coming close to closing the round. They have also seen significant growth during the shutdown period, partly because of their technology’s ability to help customers operate their businesses remotely with minimal staff at their cultivation and processing facilities. As a result they have managed to turn potentially negative situations into positive ones.
Elevated Signal’s biggest challenge will be to figure out the best way to scale the company in terms of hiring and office space, when so much has changed in relation to human interaction. Elevated Signal’s is a tight-knit team and one of the things their staff loves most about Elevated Signals is our office culture. They have also established close relationships with customers and enjoy meeting them in person. Scaling back face-to-face interactions with customers and changing the way they work as a team has been interesting. That said, as a software company, their team has been able to stay hyperproductive remotely and may now be more open to recruiting top talent in distributed locations.
Team
Amar Singh, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder – Prior to starting Elevated Signals, Amar spent 10 years in infrastructure project delivery, having managed high-profile university, corporate, and government projects valued from $5 million to $50 million. Amar worked on research facilities including the Biotron Experimental Climate Change Research Centre, the Autonomous Robotic Greenhouse, and the Cairns Health and Bioscience Research Complex’s containment level 3 lab – while doing so, he became passionate about controlled environment agriculture as it pertains to sustainable food supply as well as to the production of molecules with the ability to benefit health and society. Amar holds a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu alongside various degrees in environmental science, water engineering, and business from the University of Toronto, Western University, and the University of British Columbia.
Hardeep Shoker, Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder – Hardeep has a passion for building products that people will love. Having started programming and graphic design at an early age, Hardeep quickly became a hungry tech entrepreneur, acquiring his first web development contracts while in high school. Having studied computing science at SFU where he focused on distributed systems, Hardeep soon found himself as a developer at Nitobi working on PhoneGap Build where he further matured his product development skills. After Nitobi was acquired by Adobe, Hardeep soon transitioned to lead developer where he guided product decisions and worked to help his team deliver project milestones. After reverting back to his entrepreneurial calling Hardeep left Adobe to focus on building social impact ventures where he can use his UI, UX, development, and project management skills to deliver products that focus on the future of education, agriculture, and clean tech. With Elevated Signals, Hardeep is laser-focused on building industry leading software and nurturing the progression of sales and technology staff.
Benn Mapes, CTO & Co-Founder – Benn is an enthusiastic software engineer with a broad range of technical skills from full stack web development to mobile applications to hardware hacking. Prior to Elevated Signals, he worked on software at Adobe. Benn is passionate about the open source community – he is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and a committer to Apache Cordova. Benn’s interests range from space travel to automated gardening systems to AI, and he is constantly exploring the latest technologies in these areas. He graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in Cognitive Systems – Computational Intelligence & Design.
Funding
The company successfully completed the Creative Destruction Lab technology accelerator in 2018, through which they met several key advisors and investors. During the program they received a term sheet and proceeded to raise an oversubscribed $1.2 million seed round. They are now raising a minimum of $1.5 million to help fuel their rapid expansion. They have a lead from an investment firm with specialization in their space and over 60% of the round has already been committed.
Due to their significant increase in customers this year, they would be looking to use the funding to hire additional software developers to help support customer needs while developing new features and analytics that keep them ahead of the competition. They will also be boosting the sales and marketing teams as they look to expand geographically.
Revenue Model
Elevated Signals’ revenue is subscription-based. Fees charged are relative to the size of the customers’ organization.
Details
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