In September 2019, Ecoation opened its brand new headquarters in North Vancouver, BC. The new location can house 70 employees and has a fully functional assembly line and manufacturing workshop that can support the rapid growth of the company. In October 2019, the company opened its joint office at Kingsville, Ontario with FormFlex North America.
Ecoation has already commissioned 10 OKO ScoutRobots and 3 IRIS ScoutRobots to customers in Canada, US, Mexico, France and the Netherlands and is in the process of launching its products in Russia. The first commercial OKO machine was delivered to Nature Fresh Farms last week.
The company is in advanced stages of partnership conversations with eight Dutch companies that provide products and services to the industry.
Ecoation had prominent investors from NASA, Microsoft, Amazon and Google and now, Ecoation has formed an executive team with more than 100 years of collective experience in commercialization and the industry. The following individuals have joined the company:
Dr. Christian Nansen, Scientific Advisory Board
Since earning his PhD in 2000, Dr. Christian Nansen has worked in both academia and private industry. He has over 15 years of research experience with applications of hyperspectral imaging and classifications of hyperspectral data. He performs drone-based remote sensing, and studies applications of proximal remote sensing as part of developing machine vision systems. Since 2015, he has been affiliated with the department of Entomology and Nematology at University of California Davis. He hopes to contribute to the development of solutions within the broad frameworks of sustainable food production and pest management. He is passionate about our shared duty to empower future generations with concrete ideas, inspiration and preparedness to meet and solve legacy environmental challenges.
Dr. Greg Stewart, SVP Analytics
Greg Stewart’s interests are in developing and deploying advanced control and analytic technologies to solve industrial problems. An industrial researcher with an adjunct professor appointment, he has led all phases of the research, development and industrial deployment of technology for several areas including robust paper machine control, microalgae cultivation, large scale data centers, carbon fiber brake manufacture, semiconductor fabrication, and an intrapreneurial start-up initiative for automotive powertrain control which was stood up as new business (Honeywell Automotive Software). Recent projects include reinforcement learning for maintenance-free control of industrial chemical processes, and pragmatic techniques for high performing and robustly stable control of real-world nonlinear systems. He received a B.Sc. in Physics and an M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from Dalhousie University, and a PhD from University of British Columbia in Control Engineering. Dr. Stewart is a Fellow of the IEEE and of IFAC, received the IFAC Industrial Achievement Award 2017, twice received the IEEE Control Systems Technology Award in 2002 and in 2012, the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award. He holds 33 patents, has published more than 50 technical publications, and his designs reside on over 300 industrial installations. He enjoys family, mountain biking, cooking, and is a certified judge for competitive barbecue.
Brian MacDonald, Director of Product Management
Brian MacDonald joins Ecoation as the Director of Product Management bringing over 25 years of experience in conceiving, building and delivering software products in many of the world’s most challenging areas including real-time systems, automation, high performance computing, business intelligence and machine learning. Most recently at the Oracle Corporation, Brian played a key role in establishing the Adaptive Intelligent Apps product team responsible for the direct integration of machine learning and artificial intelligence into Oracle's ERP applications. This follows a decade of core product roles including the delivery of Oracle’s first self-service data visualization cloud service. While new to agriculture, Brian has rapidly moved to understand the challenges involved with greenhouse operations and looks forward to applying the experience of enterprise computing to the unique demands of horticultural growers.
Matthew Cox, Director of Engineering
Matthew Cox has held senior management engineering roles at multiple industry leaders for over 15 years after a 5-year career as an engineer. While working at ACTIVE Network, he lead multiple engineering teams to deliver scaled and highly available event management and payment processing SaaS businesses. He was asked to lead and deliver implementing a 100+ engineer enterprise distributed agile framework, expansion and integration of insourcing engineering development centres in 4 mainland China locations, and the creation and implementation of automated enterprise payment processing reconciliation to ready for a successful IPO. Years after the successful IPO and a transition of ACTIVE Network to private equity he exited to join Henry Schein, the leading global distributor of medical and dental supplies/ software and multiple winner of Fortune World’s Most Admired Company. He brought the world’s leading global academic dental healthcare solution to the cloud, a first for that industry. From this success Matthew was headhunted to join Amazon and the AWS Marketplace division. As an AWS senior engineering leader he lead multiple teams of engineers, designers, and product managers to deliver the seller experiences and cloud services for the world’s largest cloud software store. After multiple years at Amazon he nonetheless felt the pull of Ecoation and the opportunity to innovate in the AgTech space and aim to make a global difference in food production quality and efficiency.
Greg Barrett, Chief Financial Officer
Greg Barrett is a Canadian CPA, CA with over 20 years of international business experience that includes consulting with PricewaterhouseCoopers and several senior leadership positions with both hyper-growth technology and public companies. Greg’s professional background includes technical accounting and financial reporting, business process improvement, transaction support, risk management, internal controls and SEC compliance. In recent years he has also focused on operational finance, commercial development and growth acceleration. His background is focused on the technology sector and he is active in the BC tech community and participates in technology industry associations.
Sven Riemer, Director of Government Relations
Sven Riemer is an experienced Director with a demonstrated history of working in the clean technology and environment industry, driven by the desire to reduce the environmental impacts of business while improving the bottom line. Sven is entrepreneurial and skilled in strategic planning, business planning, business development, project management, financial and management due diligence, business and program analysis, risk management, results/outcomes based management, and quality management, with rich experience in business/program analysis and planning. He is a motivated and results-driven professional with a "Diplom" (Canadian Masters equivalency) focused in Geography from Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, a Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) designation, and financial management and executive development certificates. “Meaningful work that makes a difference” continues to be a guiding principle, as he cares strongly about environmental issues.
The company is currently looking for a “Director of Customer Success”. Interested individuals can send their resume to hr@ecoation.com or visit us at FormFlex / Ecoation Booth at the Canadian Greenhouse Conference. They also have several job openings in Kingsville, Ontario and North Vancouver, BC.
For more information:
Ecoation Innovative Solutions Inc.
949 3rd St. West, Unit 113
North Vancouver, BC V7P 3P7
Canada
T: +1 (866) 899-5491 Ext. 101
www.ecoation.com