Elevated Signals

Here is a fact about the physical economy that almost nobody outside of it thinks about: an enormous amount of the world's manufacturing still runs on paper. Someone in a lab coat writes down a batch number on a clipboard, transcribes it into a spreadsheet at the end of the shift, and then, months later, when a regulator shows up, a team of people spends a frantic week trying to reconstruct what actually happened. This is not a story about a rare edge case. This is, roughly, the default.

Elevated Signals is a company built entirely around the conviction that this is insane, and fixable. It is a Vancouver-based software company - with a second address in San Francisco - that makes what it calls manufacturing operations software. That phrase is deliberately unglamorous, and the company leans into it. Its own marketing says the quiet part loud: "We're not another ERP. We're the alternative."

The origin story is better than the category suggests. Amar Singh, Benn Mapes, and Hardeep Shoker founded the company in 2016 with an idea that had nothing to do with batch records. They wanted to build IoT sensors to optimize irrigation in greenhouses - a watering problem, essentially. Then Canada legalized cannabis, and a strange thing happened. The greenhouses they were talking to didn't just have a watering problem. They had a compliance problem, an inventory problem, a traceability problem, and a paperwork problem so severe it threatened the entire operation.

Cannabis, it turns out, is one of the most heavily regulated industries on earth. Every gram has to be accounted for. Every conversion, every waste event, every transfer has to be logged in a way a government auditor will accept. For a founder, this is either a nightmare or a gift, depending on your disposition. Elevated Signals decided it was a gift. If you can build software that survives seed-to-sale traceability and a live regulatory audit, you have effectively built software that can run any regulated factory. The hard customer is the moat.

So the company pivoted from sensors to software, and pointed itself at the hardest possible first market. The product that emerged is a cloud-based platform that replaces the paper and the spreadsheets and the aging on-premise ERP with a single, real-time source of truth. Inventory updates as things move. Quality checks are digitized. Batch records are electronic. When the auditor shows up, the answer is already on screen.

The platform is organized into seven modules - inventory, quality and compliance, traceability, planning and scheduling, accounting and costing, manufacturing, and procurement and fulfillment. In practice that covers the whole arc of a physical good, from raw material coming in the door to finished product going out. It is GMP-capable, third-party validated, SOC2 compliant, and it talks to QuickBooks, which is the sort of deeply practical detail that matters enormously to the people who actually have to run the books.

In February 2024 the company announced a $7.9 million CAD Series A led by Yaletown Partners, with participation from Third Kind Venture Capital, WGD Capital, Raiven Capital, Pareto Holdings, and angel Colin Harris. That brought total funding to roughly $10.5 million CAD. In venture terms this is not a moonshot number, and that is arguably the point. Elevated Signals is not trying to win a hype cycle. It is trying to become the boring, load-bearing software that regulated factories cannot operate without - a market large and unsexy enough that most software companies never bothered to serve it well.

The interesting move now is expansion. Having earned its scars in cannabis, the company is applying the same playbook to adjacent regulated verticals: nutraceuticals, food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, contract manufacturing, and - more surprisingly - critical minerals recovery and mining. The logic is clean. The regulations differ, but the shape of the problem does not. Everyone has inventory they can't see, quality data trapped on paper, and an audit they're dreading. And with a San Francisco office, the U.S. market is squarely in view.

The customer list already reads like a who's-who of the sector it started in - Tilray, Red White & Bloom, MTL Cannabis, Safari Flower, Rubicon Organics, and Medcan Australia among them. The team is small, remote-friendly, and grew about 30% in 2023. None of this is the stuff of breathless headlines. But if you have ever watched a compliance team scramble through a filing cabinet at 11pm, you understand exactly why it matters.