Immigrant workers are an important workforce for U.S. farms, but bringing them into the country with the appropriate H-2A visas can be complex, and the compliance surrounding these employees can be burdensome for farms. Masu. Seso was founded five years ago with the aim of streamlining that process and is now aiming to expand into a one-stop HR platform for the agriculture industry.
Michael Guirguis co-founded the startup after his cousin asked for advice on whether to expand their organic farm. Despite the demand for the crop, Guirgis, whose entire career has been involved in job creation and the labor market, is scaling up as the industry's labor shortage makes it difficult to hire enough workers. said it was unwise. This inspired Guirgis to found Seso, a company that automates agricultural machinery. The H-2A visa process solves this problem and helps farms stay compliant. Once they started talking to potential customers for the farm, they realized that the farm could use more help on the human resources side than just finding workers.
“When it comes to back offices, every farm we visited had thousands of filing cabinets,” Guirgis said. “This industry is one of the most backward in the United States, and it was an eye-opening moment. We addressed the workforce shortage and built an end-to-end modern operating system that starts with HR. and modernize many of these highly complex tasks.”
The startup just raised $26 million to expand the capabilities of its platform. The Series B round was led by Bond's Mary Meeker, with participation from Index Ventures, NFX, SV Angels, and several Seso clients. The company will double his customer base in 2023 and partners with 27 of his 100 largest agricultural employers in the United States.
Despite being a large industry ripe for disruption, agriculture has been relatively reluctant to adopt new technologies, he said. Guirgis believes that Seso has so far been successful in selling to farms, while many other startups have not. Not because Seso is trying to change the actual farming process, but because farmers have made it clear to him that they are not ready for it yet. Implementing back-office technology makes selling easier.
“Your HR team is doing traditional HR work in the back office,” says Guirgis. “These are the people whose behavior we are trying to change, and in this field it is easier for him than the people who have been still using pen and paper for 50 years. You can continue the process, you can take photos [hand-written] Create timesheets and use AI to ensure they're accurate. ”
Guirguis' focus on getting direct feedback from farmers led Index Ventures partner Nina Achadjian to invest. Achajan initially passed on Seso when she first tried to raise funds from Index, but changed her mind after seeing the company's marketing methods and interactions with farmers.
“I remember one customer calling me. It gave me chills,” Achajan told TechCrunch. “[He said]“I get pitched all the time by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and they show up at your farm and say, “This is how they run their business.'' I always tell each customer, I ask people to work with me so that I can spend a day with them and understand what a day in the life of my end customers is like, but they never show up. In the freezing cold. Michael was the only one who showed up at 4am to pick artichokes in the dark.
This feedback from farmers is why the company will next expand into payroll automation. Guirgis said farm payroll is incredibly complex due to various agricultural employment laws. According to Guirgis, workers are paid according to the amount of crops they harvest, and the fee for each crop harvested is different for migrant workers and domestic workers, and that migrant workers and domestic workers are paid differently from the same field. It's different when it's harvested. Guirguis is considering various ways to expand after that.