Factories are supposed to be places of repetition. The same recipe, the same tolerances, the same process, again and again. But repetition produces its own blizzard of exceptions: a late material, a warmer room, a changed work order, a quality hold, a batch that yielded less than the last one. If those details remain on a clipboard, the factory may complete the shift without learning much from it. Amar Singh built Elevated Signals around that gap between doing the work and remembering the work.
His route to the factory floor began with living systems. Singh studied environmental science at the University of Toronto and worked at Western University's Biotron Experimental Climate Change Research Centre. The Biotron was not an ordinary office. Its controlled greenhouses and grow chambers could simulate environments for research. The infrastructure had to hold temperature, humidity, water, and other variables within useful bounds while sensors kept watch.
That experience trained an eye for relationships. A measurement means more when it can be tied to the process that produced it. A temperature reading becomes useful when it sits beside the identity of a crop, the timing of an intervention, and the eventual result. Singh later spent years delivering infrastructure projects, including university, corporate, and government work valued from $5 million to $50 million. He learned the other half of the same lesson: complex work needs a record that survives the workday.
The idea hiding in the greenhouse
Singh returned to graduate school at the University of British Columbia for a Master of Engineering Leadership in Integrated Water Management. The program mixed technical training with business courses. Canada was building a tightly regulated medical cannabis industry, and recreational legalization was visible on the horizon. For someone interested in controlled-environment agriculture, the overlap was hard to miss. Cannabis facilities used greenhouse systems and wireless sensors, but the emerging operators also faced an unusually demanding record-keeping burden.
The first Elevated Signals idea was narrower than the company that exists today. Singh and his co-founders planned a precision-agriculture product: collect environmental readings from wireless sensors, then connect that data to the seed-to-sale systems already used by producers. It sounded tidy. Reality supplied the useful complication.
“The thing that's really caught on and driven a lot of our growth and sales is around the batch record.”Amar Singh, 2021
The existing systems did not offer the interfaces the young company expected. More important, producers told Singh that they were unhappy with those systems. The customers did not need one more sensor dashboard floating beside the rest of their operation. They needed the operation itself to become legible.
The founders widened the frame. James Douma, Benn Mapes, and Hardeep Shoker brought software experience; early relationships with Tantalus Labs and Anandia Laboratories created room for pilot projects. Tantalus, with its hybrid greenhouse in British Columbia, became the first operating partner. Elevated Signals began pairing environmental data with inventory tracking and digital production records designed for Canada's rules.
Paper was the competitor
The word “compliance” can flatten a vivid operational problem into office language. In a regulated production facility, every batch has a biography. Materials arrive. Plants or ingredients move through steps. Employees follow procedures. Quality checks pass or fail. Regulators may later ask the producer to show that the written process and the actual process were the same.
When that biography is scattered across paper forms and disconnected spreadsheets, an audit becomes an archaeological dig. Even when the records are complete, the knowledge inside them is difficult to search. A manager can prove that work happened and still struggle to see why one batch outperformed another.
Digital batch records became the wedge. Elevated Signals could bring together inventory, environmental measurements, procedures, and quality evidence, then make the result searchable. The same record that helped prepare for a regulator could also support planning, costing, yield analysis, and daily production decisions. Compliance paid attention to the past. Operations could use the same data to change the future.
There is a useful founder lesson in this turn. Singh did not discard his earlier experience when the sensor-integration plan broke. He moved it into a larger system. The environmental readings still mattered. They simply needed operational neighbors. The product became more valuable when the company stopped treating the sensor as the center of the story.
When customers resist your integration plan, ask whether the missing connection is actually the product. Elevated Signals found its market by building the context around the data it had first planned merely to collect.
A regulated market as a design partner
Cannabis gave the company an exacting first customer. Canadian producers had to track material from cultivation through finished goods and document adherence to standard procedures. The requirement exposed every loose handoff. It also gave Elevated Signals a demanding environment in which to refine inventory, quality, traceability, and reporting.
By 2021, the company served producers across sizes, from craft operators to larger greenhouse businesses, and was starting deployments in the United States. Singh saw a difference between the markets. Canadian operators placed heavy emphasis on compliance. In more mature western US markets, intense competition made performance optimization more urgent. The same operational data could answer both needs.
The product continued to move outward. Inventory grew beyond plants to include nutrients, packaging, and other materials. Production tracking connected to quality. Planning connected to costing. A system born around cultivation started looking like a manufacturing platform, because cultivation at scale is manufacturing with biology inside it.
Pressure is information
Singh has another practice built around feedback. He is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, coach, and competitor with Alliance Vancouver. On his public profile, he describes the sport's technical character and constant evolution as a way to stay sharp. More recently, he has written about entering AI hackathons alongside competition in sport and technology sales.
The parallel with company building is almost too neat, but Singh supplies it himself: “I don't win every fight, but I learn a lot and improve in every loss.” In jiu-jitsu, a technique has to work against resistance. In manufacturing software, a workflow has to survive a shift full of exceptions. Both replace elegant theory with live pressure.
That attitude also appeared when Singh returned to UBC in 2021 to speak with engineering-leadership students. He pointed them toward entrepreneurship programs, mentors, business courses, and a shelf of practical books. He described entrepreneurship as a path of uncertainty. His advice was not a lone-genius story. It was a map of resources: learn to present, use the network, understand venture mechanics, and keep reading.
“I don't win every fight, but I learn a lot and improve in every loss.”Amar Singh on competition, 2026
Beyond the first factory
In February 2024, Elevated Signals announced a $7.9 million CAD Series A led by Yaletown Partners. The financing marked a shift already underway. Cannabis remained important, but the company was taking its approach into agriculture, natural products, critical-minerals recovery, and other complex production environments. The categories differ. Their operational headache rhymes.
Traditional enterprise systems can impose a rigid model on work that changes frequently. At the other extreme, spreadsheets flex until they become invisible infrastructure, difficult to govern and harder to trust. Elevated Signals occupies the middle: structured enough for traceability and audit readiness, adaptable enough to reflect how a particular facility works.
The company's current language has expanded from ERP toward manufacturing operations and intelligence. Inventory, work orders, quality events, planning, costing, and compliance become a shared data layer. The emerging AI layer makes the old batch-record insight more consequential. Models can only reason over factory activity when the underlying activity has been captured cleanly and given context.
Singh's story is less about a sudden revelation than a series of adjacent rooms. The grow chamber led to sensors. Infrastructure delivery led to records. Water engineering led to controlled agriculture. Cannabis regulation led to digital batch histories. Customer frustration led to a platform. Each room supplied a piece that made sense only after he entered the next one.
A factory remembers when its measurements, materials, decisions, and outcomes remain connected. That memory helps during an audit, but it also tells an operator what the organization did well, where the margin went, and what should change on the next run. Singh began by trying to help growers see their environment. The larger work is helping manufacturers see themselves.