From Soil to Stock Exchange: Scaling Senus into a Global Environmental Intelligence Leader

Welcome to Smooth Scaling, the podcast where we navigate the exciting but complex journey of growing an international business. I'm Marie Dunlund, CEO of Platform 94. Each episode we will bring you real-world stories, insights and advice from entrepreneurs, experts and industry leaders. So whether you're scaling your own business, supporting others, or simply curious about the journey, this is the podcast for you. Thank you so much for listening and stay straight in. Welcome back. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Owen Finnerin, co-founder of Sennis, formerly known as Firemy. Sennis has mapped over 3.5 million acres for soil health, building what the company describes as the largest geotag soil health database in Europe. It's an environmental tech business that's grown from strong Irish roots in Ross Common, to operating internationally with clients across multiple countries. And most recently Sennis reached a major milestone. The company listed on Euro next in December 2025 with a market capitalization of approximately 13 million Euro, marking a whole new chapter in this exciting journey. In today's conversation we've explored the founder's story behind Sennis. What it takes to build trust in the traditionally cautious sector, the pressures that come with scaling data and ambition at the same time, and the vision for where Sennis goes next. So let's go and meet Owen. So Owen, welcome. Who are the very first guests of season two? Thanks for here. delighted to be here. Well, what a great way to start because as you say yourself, you are a farmer, a scientist and a founder, a very rare blend. And so to start with Owen, why don't you maybe tell us a little bit about your own personal background and how the idea for what was far my came from? Yeah, so I suppose I grew up on a family farm in South Terros, common west of Ireland. And that always is great interest in agriculture and up, but also in nature. Like it was one of these kind of nerdy kids that had my little pocketbook of birds and stuff like that. But I had a great interest in farming and study that in university and Dublin. And then I also had an interest in, you know, like business and after working in farm advisory and education, third level and after doctors and post doctors and agriculture, decided that I wanted to work for myself and set up a farm consultancy business. And kind of through that work and through, you know, other experiences and family and neighbors, I would have seen farmers doing a lot of good things for the environment, but even my own grandfather, like he used to have, you know, lots of lovely old white torn trees around the farm, that were some of them were there for a couple of hundred years and to be a lovely blossom for the pollinators there in the Montame, would actually, because of the rules and some of the development of agriculture schemes, the farmers were actually penalized for letting these grow in the field because, you know, according to their scheme rules, it had to be farage or agrarian as a belaria. And this used to frustrate me that farmers were doing good for the environment, but they weren't being recognized or rewarded for us. So then when the concept or the idea of far my came along, I jumped at us as a potentially this was a great solution. Okay. And like it's great obviously you would come from that background, so you had a lot of knowledge that you would have brought up with, but it is also a challenging industry, especially to be common with a new technology in an industry that would have very established ways of doing things and you're trying to earn the trust, farmers and landowners. So maybe talk us through the early days then of the business inception and then overcome those obstacles. So I suppose the first I heard a fair my was Wayne, Brendan Allen got in touch with me and I had done some work kind of ad hoc with Brendan in the past, you know, different projects. And he said we have a research project in the University in Goli and he says we're at the commercialization phase and we're just looking for a bit of input. So I came in and looked at us and the Joe DeBene was lead, I'm software engineer working on the project and I taught the technology was brilliant, but I suppose like a lot of academic projects, they had put the technology first and maybe not taught about the application or who was going to use it and get value from us. I was delighted to get involved on one proviso, which was that the two lads Brendan and Joe came along with me and luckily enough, they did and the rest was history. And that's the challenge and it's that's then because you're getting used to working with each other and you all have different skill sets and style. So maybe talk us through the growth milestones then from that point. Yeah, so I suppose the first thing maybe when we decided to license the software from the university and spin it out as a private company was the tech had been built in my mind anyway to face the wrong person. So it was built as a software platform to face a farmer user and I suppose from my own background and experience, I couldn't think of any worse business case than to be trying to sell software to farmers because well, first of all, farmers of no money as we all know. Sure, yeah. And the second thing that they have a complete charge of is time and usually like a soul trader and a lot of them have other jobs as well. So the last thing they want to do is download another app and have another app on their phone. So what we want to do or what I want to do in the early days was to essentially rebuild the technology that was facing a different user who needed the same or some of the same data and could make greater value out of it than the farmer code. I let the same time give a benefit to the farmer. So what I mean by that is we basically took us and we turned it around to face the agri food corporates. So the people who were buying the product from the farmer and had a need for a large scale, a farm level data and could monetize that and give a reward back to the farmer who was doing good as part of their production system. Brilliant. And how early did that realise? Well, for me, it was day one because like I said, I didn't want to be involved in trying to sell software to farmers. You know, it's difficult enough to get farmers to pay for something that gives them an immediate benefit as opposed to something that's little less tangible, which like software. It did take time to do that, obviously. And you know, there was a lot of blood sweat and tears there in the first few years where we were skrimping on scraping and trying to get that operational and up to a good enough standard that we could go in front of the dairy co-ops, the legs of Plan B and Lakeland Deries and give them something that was over a high enough standard that they would be happy to pay for. Okay. And throughout this process, who was debentifing the technology and when were you in a position to take on your first employee? Yeah. So, first employee, I think, was actually year three. So we grew quite slowly, bootstrapped in the first years. It was Joel on the technology side and me on the business development or the sales side and Brendan was looking after, I suppose, the longer term plan and the growth beyond that. You know, as we've grown, we've actually kind of swapped roles. So that's nearly what I'm doing now. Brendan is more of a coordination role. But yeah, first hire would have been in year three and that would have been after our first significant large scale customer Tierlaun and then shortly after that Lakeland Deries and that really just set us off on a part of what? Yeah, because I was going to ask that in terms of customer acquisition, did you find it hard in those early days or to sell and to really get the vision across? Obviously, once you had the cured landia, it was obviously selling itself after that. But did you find those early days difficult to win that first big contract? Yeah, it was difficult, but I suppose I like a challenge, so I enjoyed it. And funnily enough, I'm kind of back in that role, that kind of pioneer in knocking on doors role now, but outside of Ireland. Last year, we decided to kind of shake up our management structure a little bit and just essentially looking five years down the line and sort of saying, you know, how can we scale this 10x now from where we are? And we decided in a way that the three founders would nearly go back to what we were doing in the early days that got us that success in the first couple of years. So now that's my director of growth role is doing that knocking on doors and driving up and down more ways in the US like it'll be next month. That's great. Well, they were your natural skill sets to begin with, so that's fantastic. And tell me then, it seemed to kind of further pivot as it evolved from farm management more to natural capital, and environmental measurement. So where did that pivoting opportunity come from? Yeah, I suppose it was a response to the customers and what the customers needed. We started with soil and soil measurement technology because soil is the foundation of all good food production systems. You need healthy soil to have healthy crops. You need healthy crops to have healthy livestock and healthy humans ultimately. That still is our main product is soil management and measurements software. But some of the same customers, the likes of the Tierlands and Lakeland areas, they were coming to us saying, look, did you have a fantastic solution there for measuring and verifying the health of the soil? But we're getting questions from our customers about soil carbon and the carbon sequestration and how that can be measured for working towards a net zero target, for example. And so we followed the customers lead and we essentially tweaked the product to be able to give us soil carbon solution. And then more recently that would have evolved into water and biodiversity solutions for similar type of customers. And in the last couple of years, even for a broader industry sector, so we're no longer solely focused on agriculture and agriculture. We have environmental engineering companies and even companies in the financial services sector as customers. So it's growing as opposed in terms of the customer base and industry sector as well as the products. Yeah, one of the amazing things really about what you're doing is that you're taking extremely complex data. But you're having to make that really simple Internet of the customer, the more customers actually want, which is. really simple, quick, efficient, easy to use information. How have you managed that? Has that been as that been difficult to get that model right? Well, actually, yes, it's been difficult, but I think a lot of the successes, them from what we learned in the early days working for farm advisers and consultants and directly are indirectly for farmers, your right, there's a lot of complex technology in the background. So in the mobile applications or in the web applications, there's a huge amount of technology even in the simple, what seems like a simple GPS oil sample application. There's this serious amount of technology in the background of it. But, at the end of the day, the customer wants, like you say, something that's easy to interpret and straightforward. And we found that the most popular thing that we could deliver to farmers early on was just a colour-coded map of the farm. So very, very simple, but the farmers got huge benefit out of this because they could see literally out of glance, okay, this part of the farm is red and yellow, there's a problem up there and there's greens and blues down here. So that's all under control. Don't need to worry about that. And what it was doing was basically giving them an action about insight really, really quickly. Great, yeah. And that's exactly a nice, far more usable and easy to use than very quick to understand, which is great. And then just a side question, I guess, because the amount of data you're dealing with is obviously a huge strategic asset for the business. What I imagine that in itself also brings a strain and a pressure and a worry in some ways to the business, so how do you manage stuff? Yes, but in terms of scale of data, we have, we're lucky in a way that what Joe DeBene is a genius when it comes to this sort of stuff, the original architecture of the software was built and designed in such a way that it was ready to deal with enormous data sets. So we're really lucky that that was built from the start in that way because your right, we would have struggled a lot as we grew if that hadn't been the case. So that's been a huge help. The other thing in terms of data sets that's evolved for us is that we focus initially on in field verification. So mobile apps for GPS soil sampling are mobile apps for an ecologist to do a survey in a field and take geotag photographs and have really precise measurements on the ground and that could be verified or audited in the future, all electronically, of course, and on a map. But we found that some of our customers, for some of our customers, this was too precise and they actually wanted something maybe that was lower cost, more scalable from satellite and that led on to what culminated there just last November in our acquisition of a London based company that focused on satellite geospatial modeling. So they gave us that into the spectrum in terms of products that we could measure at scale from satellite, while also given the ability to do precise measurements in the field if the customer needs that as well. Okay, great. In terms of the environment you're operating in, so we look at ESG, BioJiversity, Sustainable Finance, Agriculture, there are all areas where there's a lot of noise going on. So for you, how would you, first of all, I guess, differentiate between what's real and what industry hype, you know, but then also how do you differentiate yourself as a genuine great player with us who are offering in those industries when the wave kind of overnight offerings appearing, like I said, in short term fixes. That's a great question to be honest with you because yet there's been hundreds, probably thousands of hours of discussion on that exact topic over the last few years and the solution is I see it is that we give our customers a differentiation maybe it's, we give our customers a dual solution. So we're not just given the money ESG solution, we're given them something that saves the business money, it reduces waste, effectively improves their bottom line, while also given the money ESG compliance may be solution at the same time. So great example at farm level or for the likes of the Lakeland dairies, because we're able to give this precise, saw a nutrient information to the farmers, they're able to reduce the fertilizer usage by 25%. So that's a huge impact on the farmers bottom line, while at the same time given a real positive impact on the current footprint of that milk production for Lakeland dairies, for example. So it's a win-win. That's how I see the kind of solution for ESG and it's a sort of, it's an insurance really, I suppose, against policy change or what might be just trends evolving over time that this is something that's of interest now and might not be of interest to a lot of corporate level companies in a few years' time, but reducing waste and saving money is always going to be of interest to all companies. Degrading about that is also improving environmental impact at the same time. But also being a safe pair, so people can go to an entrusted advisor and I think that's really smart, is that all encompassing the solution, therefore that you're offering rather than we said the kind of quick picks have come up. Yeah, I wouldn't underestimate what you've done in terms of reputation you've built in terms of costumers and being that real go-to source. Tell me about the rebrand, so when and why did the rebrand happen? Yeah, so I suppose I mentioned already that two, three years ago we had started selling to non-agree food clients, so the likes of the environmental engineer and our ecology companies and then more recently banks and financial institutions. At that point, around that time as well, two years ago, we were just at the stage where we were growing faster outside of Ireland than in us. We had always talked about the pharma name and brand in that it's fine, obviously, an agriculture and agriculture food, but when you go into other industry sectors and maybe you go into a sales meeting with the financial institution in the UK, they may have looked at the name and told us, "Well, that's not appropriate for us." We had been considering it for a period of time and then just at the stage where we were starting to grow more rapidly in the UK and in Europe. From a time and point of view, it was really good. And then the senus name itself, actually, that was, I take no credit for that one, that came from Brendan Allen's genius again. It was, I don't know if you ever heard of the guy, the map maker that called Tullamy. He was a second century Roman cartographer, so he worked for Julius Caesar, although I think he was Egyptian himself. I knew none of this, by the way, until about 18 months ago, but he was famous at the time because or became famous afterwards because he was the first person to draw a map, but the world in the shape of a globe, rather than on a 2D plane. And Tullamy was one of the first known maps of Ireland and senus was the name that he gave to the river Shannon. Oh, wow, okay. The name came from. Fantastic, great. Yeah. And I mean, obviously, like, any rebrand that the transition takes time. I think that's great to hear of the impact and the amount of demand coming internationally. So looking at your current portfolio, what percentage is outside of Ireland? So at the moment, about 20% of our business is outside of Ireland. The most of that is in the UK, but it is grown quite rapidly. We have customers in 16 countries now in total. And that, like I said, it's grown on a week-to-week basis at this stage. Right. So it wasn't enough to deal with multiple pivots and to have to deal with all the industry changes and to deal with a rebrand. You decided that it was time to list your own ex. Baby, talk we through the journey to that point and how that came about. So suppose we're looking in a way in that we hadn't taken in much external funding in the growth of the company. We had, like I said, bootstrapped in the early years. We took in a small bit of funding through an accelerator program within DRC back in 2017. And asine. And then we took a small bit of the private investment from a couple of individuals. A couple of those individuals were very supportive and they were really good fish for our vision for growth for the company. They also had a background in the stock market and in trading of stocks over long careers. And so with one particular investor who was quite keen on the idea of using the public markets to effectively fund growth, whether it was organic growth or inorganic growth as a company to merge their acquisitions down the line. And it probably took us a while to come around to that. But the timing then aligned with that acquisition opportunity that we just mentioned of the London based company called Lohmann last autumn. And yeah, things just came together. It was the right time. And the most important factor of all though was that we came across a company called a Sidious. And a Sidious or Dublin based small company whose purpose is, I suppose, to assist a small and medium sized companies to list on the stock market. And we couldn't have done it without them. You know, so if we were to have taken the kind of more traditional approach of getting the traditional list in sponsors and all of the administers of cost and burden that would go with that, we probably wouldn't have gone for it. But like I said, the Sidious approaches to make it more accessible and affordable for a smaller and medium sized company. And that was a big part of the solution for us. Sure. And the Sidious and you're next to actually here at an event last year. And which I found hugely educational itself, because I would have also had a lot of misconceptions which I think a lot of business leaders have. And I think people can over weigh the thought of no public responsibilities versus the private flexibility. Like what were some of the misconceptions you had? Yeah, I suppose the biggest fear that most companies might have of listing would be the compliance requirements and reporting. Well, from our point of view, like I said, we're probably lucky in that we put in good governance structures and had a good board there from the early days. But we didn't have any fears from that point of view. You know, things were done rise and we had good structures in place. from the reporting point of view then like I said the big sweetener in it for us was to be able to rely on somebody that was really familiar and comfortable with keeping you compliant in terms of a company like Sidious. That's the key thing as someone who has been through before I can kind of walk you through the process and having gone through the process. Everybody learning the right advice that you would give to another founder maybe think I was giving a similar route. Yeah well I suppose first thing I'd say is you know it's just because it's the right solution for us it might be the right answer for another company. But we found the process quite smooth to be honest with you for a girl and Barry and Sidious were fantastic help and they did a lot of the heavy lifting. What Brendan was focused on the list and process from our side and it was really. Smoothed for us by a Sidious and then you're next like you say we're also really helpful they were obviously looking for the last number of years for a new. Company to list on the Irish America so it was a positive news story for them as well so yeah it was a fantastic process I wouldn't really regret about it anyway. Yeah I must be a proud one. Yeah absolutely it's another step in stone I suppose you know our approach to business is maybe not like some other companies we might like to do things slightly differently. It's just another example I think. Okay and I guess talking about advice looking back on the journey today. What would you say have been the biggest challenges overall in terms of getting the business to where it is. Biggest challenges I suppose probably in the early days it was building a team you know a team that has got us to the point now in the last couple of years like I say where the founders can go back to focus and earn our strengths and what got the business to where it was in the first place. But in those kind of intervening years we had to build a team and a structure that could satisfy the customer needs build an excellent product and give the support afterwards and that took time. I don't know if you'd like to say it's not a destination it's not to say that we're finished with it it's still ongoing but we've an excellent general manager there now in Stephen Cohen and he's keeping things taken along really nicely and in terms of the team point of view. We're building the team and you know people that was probably one of the bigger challenges that I think eventually we got to a really positive place. Yeah and building this in rural Ireland like in Roscoman is incredible and that brings a number of positives but you know it must also bring challenges especially when you're trying to hire data scientists. Were you able to find local employees that could go up skilled or have you trying to track people back into the area where were the people coming from. Yeah a great question so we were lucky enough in that we're my supposed we based the office in that loan one of the reasons for that was because it was going to be close to the train line. So it gave us both access for people from go away or from Dublin and we have people commuting quite a distance actually. But we also have a hybrid work and environment so people are typically only in the office usually two to three days per week so it's a nice blend I think and it's working quite well. And throughout that journey was there ever a moment where you thought this is not going to work. Do lots of them. Yeah absolutely yeah there was several along the way. Yeah we just had to I suppose dig deep and maybe go back to our original principles and vision for the company and prioritize things and drops on things that maybe were a distraction at different times. But we've yeah we've had to do that a few times had a few pivots and luckily to date the ball brought us out the right side. Before you and I mean you seem to be excellent at capitalizing and opportunities as they came along and being able to pivot quickly and to move as you needed to which was great. But was there any mistake made early that actually ended up being a great positive fit? Yeah that's a great question I'm sure it was actually I mentioned the team and the growth. One of the mistakes at one point in time we made was we probably had a period where we took in some investment and we actually overhired and we grew maybe a little bit too quickly in terms of team. And that had a period there of kind of you know maybe there's a little bit of friction and maybe we hired people who worked maybe appropriate because we felt that we had a huge demand from customers and we had to get the product built and we had to get it out there so it was huge pressure on. So that's something maybe that we didn't do right at the time we probably should have been more gradual about that but ultimately once we got out the right side of us it's left us with a much more cohesive unified team and things are going really well. Brilliant okay so I guess following on from that we're looking ahead three years down the line where would you like Sennis to be. So we'd like to be the world leader for natural capital measurement we'll do that combination of two ways really so we're going to continue to grow in our existing core markets like agri food and environmental. But also on financial services and financial institutions sector that's a huge area growth for us at the moment and then the second way will be through inorganic growth so mergers and acquisitions is something that we're actively looking at. You know there's a lot of instability in the world politically and economically at the moment but that kind of instability creates opportunities as well and strategically there's you know this company's that we're looking at that could give us the option to scale quite quickly and that'll be paired with the growth as well. Okay and what I'd like to most about the industry itself then that kind of chaos yeah so no I'm that kind of a strange person to probably speak a lot of people but I'm that sort of person that enjoys that maybe I suppose from the early days in the sheep marathon balance low and dealing with the dealers and all the shenanigans that go on there. That could be where it comes from I don't know I like a little bit of volatility in the Americas you know ultimately it's but you're not going to be making rash decisions and you know as we grow and become a bigger company or a public company now you know we can't be pulling handbreak turns here there and everywhere we have to stick to the plan and we will be put at the same time that bit of volatility is also create an opportunity. Absolutely an opportunity that can be readily available by a company that is structurally sound and ready to go when that happens so for a founder today or an early stage business leader what would be your two or three key pieces of advice that you've learned along the way. I suppose if you feel that you have a really good solution and a really good idea surround yourself with good people first of all who shared that vision and by the way actually say when surround yourself with good people. You know don't have to necessarily share your same opinions or thought processes on anything because I think that was one of our strengths actually in the early days and far more was that myself and Brendan and Joel the three was came from quite diverse backgrounds we had a good diversity of opinions and all sorts of different things one thing that we had in common was that kind of shared vision for the growth of the company that diversity was a great help and then the other bit of advice that says you know basically back yourself. And listen to advice from all sides but ultimately trust you go. Grace okay well my last question before we go into our quick fire round you know you're so deeply rooted in Ross Common and the west of Ireland and we're honored that you joined a regional scaling community. What is the importance that you would place in businesses in this region of one together and collaborating when sharing ideas and learning. Yeah I mean the collaboration concept I think is fantastic you know we've always had a fairly open view in terms of talking to you know potential competitors. I feel it's always beneficial to share because you'll find when you talk to other founders or other executives and other companies they all have similar problems and challenges. And you know yourself a problem shared is a problem halved and I think you know maybe. As part of Irish history we've always been very clannish and funnily enough to place that I see it the most is maybe in some of the government agencies like I see does a lot of that has has carried into the civil service and stuff like that over the centuries. But actually for Irish companies in particular west of Ireland companies to grow on scale outside of Ireland collaboration and openness has to be big part of it and like I say this huge wisdom. In a network and a community like that so just being able to tap into it is is huge valuable. Super okay right well to finish with I have five quick fire questions so I'm going to ask you one by one and just give me the first sentence or line that comes to your head okay so you don't overthink it so. The first one is if there was one thing that you would delete from your to do list forever what would it be. Emails number two would you call yourself a ghost decision maker or a day to driven decision maker actually varies what ultimately the ghost is right to think I was 100% expected you to say data there. And you're most used phrase that work most choose phrase we come back to that. It's something you've had to unlearn. Actually one thing I've had to unlearn was you know as part of the PhD and that process you know you're learning to be very precise and have a lot of evidence to back up every statement that you make and I suppose just in the real world. I've had to unlearn that because people don't have time for that. If you could go back to the very started for my and tell yourself one sentence what would it be. Just keep going. That was fantastic. You did great. I've learned a huge amount and but really honestly I'm just in awe of what you've achieved and everything you've done but also where you're going. I get so exciting and I think the future is really exciting and that you're in a really great place. As you say take advantage of those opportunities and the chaos as it comes. Though all in thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Thank you for being the first guest of season two. and will issue every success in the next age of your scale and journey. Thanks a million. It's been a pleasure. Right, time for reflection. So I think there were two key points that jumped out at me today. The first was around clarity. So the importance of truly understanding your customer. And I think that was one of the big, early scaling decisions with tennis. It wasn't about technology. It was about recognizing who was actually deriving value from it and being willing to pivot around that. So I think clarity is the key reason for the success of the scaling journey of tennis today in terms of clarity on customer, clarity on value, clarity on timing. And then the second thing that came through strongly for me, I think sometimes when we talk about scaling, it's somehow correlated to a sense of speed. And the thing is growth isn't always about moving faster. And sometimes scaling can mean slowing down and building that right team and protecting cohesion as you grow. And I think that theme of sustainable scaling really came through strongly across the interview. So I want to sincerely thank Owen for his time and his great insights and to wish Owen and all of the team at tennis that very best in their next exciting chapter. That's it for today. As always, thank you so much for listening. It truly means a huge amount. And I look forward to bringing you more great scaling content by racing.