CANOBI TECHNOLOGIES

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What do you get when you combine a passion for information technology with an interest in natural systems? Data-driven software to help indoor farmers thrive.

If you’d told Canobi Technologies founder Robin Vincent years ago that he’d eventually be creating agriculture intelligence for indoor farming, he might not have believed you. Or if he did, the route to getting here would have looked a little different. “I had been in IT for 30 years, working my way up the ladder and ending up as an infrastructure architect, in senior leadership,” says Vincent. “But in 2014, I left the corporate world and decided to get into being an entrepreneur.”

His company started as a Software as a Service (Saas) provider of tools for small businesses. But during a presentation about the tools, Vincent was asked about a software he’d been writing for about 15 years. The software replicated saltwater environments for growing seahorses, stingrays, etc. and the person posing the question wanted to know whether or not that software could be used to grow cannabis. “I was a bit shocked at first, having not been in the industry, but the answer was yes,” says Vincent. “The question came from someone at a company of doctors, a pure research facility, and there was nothing on the market that would allow them to collect data about an environment so they could go back and see how a certain strain was grown.” So Vincent rebuilt the software from scratch, with a focus on the data of the environment in which cannabis was grown.

The name of the game is to help farmers fill the holes and operate with a complete system, to make things easier, more effective and more efficient.

Fast-forward a few years, and Canobi, and data-driven farming, have expanded beyond the cannabis industry — in fact, Vincent says Canobi’s client base is as much non-cannabis as it is cannabis now. By combining monitoring, automation and optimization powered by analytics and visualization capabilities into a SaaS-based platform, indoor farmers of all harvest types can use Canobi to improve crop quality and yields. “A big piece of the product runs at data centres at Canobi facilities, and a piece of it goes out to our farmers,” says Vincent. “It’s all web-based, so
our clients only need a tablet or device that has network connectivity, and they’ll have access to a suite of dashboards. There is also a set of business tools included.”

If this wasn’t innovative enough, Vincent says their claim to fame is Canobi’s ability to bridge the gaps of whatever technology a farm might already be using. “I come from a background of open architecture, so we are not there to displace other technologies that our customers love,” says Vincent. “We’re there to integrate with existing technology, so our system is modular. So, if you don’t want or need something, you just don’t have to have that module.” The name of the game is to help farmers fill the holes and operate with a complete system, to make things easier, more effective and more efficient.

For Vincent, Canobi is the culmination of many different experiences, but the heartbeat of the company combines two of Vincent’s passions — critical thinking and natural systems. “Getting here through the cannabis industry was a surprise, perhaps, but given my background in problem-solving IT and my interest in natural systems, like large-scale saltwater aquariums, aquaponics, hydroponics…maybe it really isn’t too much of a stretch after all.”