- Startup Emergent Connext is doubling down on agricultural IoT connectivity
- CEO Mike Roudi said IoT tech is more cost-efficient than laying fiber across hundreds of acres
- Emergent is working with Microsoft Airband and rural ISPs to fuel its rollouts
The “last mile” is often brought up as a critical part of rural broadband. Startup Emergent Connext meanwhile is looking to bring connectivity to the “first acre,” CEO Mike Roudi told Fierce.
Emergent Connext specializes in low-power wide area network (LoRaWAN) IoT technology, which basically transmits sensor data over long distances. The company recently landed over $5 million in additional funding to support IoT networks across six states – Arkansas, California, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Ohio.
According to Roudi, Emergent’s tech is ideal for industries that can’t exactly “run extension cords over 2,000 acres of farmland.” While farmers may have internet access or Wi-Fi in their administrative offices, spreading that connectivity across hundreds of acres is a more complicated – and costly- story.
Emergent’s focus on cost-effective agriculture
“You can’t drag fiber through the fields, it makes no sense to do that,” Roudi said, noting a customer recently told him they could pay as much as $8,000 just to run fiber along a quarter-mile-long driveway.
He thinks agriculture connectivity has been overlooked by federal funding programs that are primarily geared toward bringing broadband to the home. Much of the chatter currently concerns the overhaul of the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program as states scramble to re-submit their final proposals to NTIA by September 4.
“Nobody really focuses on, hey, what about all the industries that operate in these rural areas?” he said. ”They’ve got the same problems.”
Agriculture for the most part is still operating in an analog world, as Roudi explained tasks like field irrigation and monitoring of tanks and animals typically involve manual labor. But farmers don’t necessarily need a full-fledged broadband network to get the job done, he argued.
Emergent’s networks “are designed for a machine to send smart bursts of data, which is 80% of the use cases” for farms, municipalities and infrastructure companies that need monitoring tools for crops, water, air quality, etc.
“In many instances broadband is overkill for that,” Roudi said. “You don’t have to incur all the expense of trenching broadband down desolate highways for these particular applications.”
IoT is a key element of precision agriculture, which essentially is the use of modern, data-driven technologies to make farming more efficient. Manufacturers like John Deere and Monarch are similarly leveraging automation and IoT to help farmers drive down operating costs.
The global precision agriculture market is expected to reach $27.81 billion by 2031, according to a report from Meticulous Research, “driven by increasing government initiatives promoting the use of modern technologies in the agriculture sector.”
Of course, the lack of connectivity in rural areas remains a challenge, as the network that powers IoT devices has to come from somewhere. In Emergent’s case, it partners with rural ISPs that can provide backhaul, power and cell towers. Emergent doesn’t build its own IoT gateways, it gets that gear from vendor Tektelic Communications.
“Since [ISPs] already have crews that service their cell towers, they hang the gateways for us and then we enter into a business transaction to lease their services, and that allows me to get into market really fast,” said Roudi.
Emergent also touts a partnership with Microsoft’s Airband, the tech giant’s global initiative to close the digital divide via various forms of technologies (including unused broadcast frequencies). The startup is tapping into Microsoft’s “core infrastructure” and “marketing expertise” to assist with its IoT network deployment in California, Roudi added.
Given all the regulatory changes that are happening in the telecom landscape, “the digital revolution for a lot of these industries that operate in these remote areas is finally at our doorstep, and we’re going to help them kick it open,” he concluded.