Sumer Johal

Sumer Johal remembers the conversations before he understood what they meant. Weather. Labor. Prices. The talk that filled the dining room in his family's home in Punjab, India, where farming was not an abstraction but the thing the household lived and worried by. "I remember dining room conversations around weather, labor, prices and how it got worse every year," he has said. His father worked for one of India's early tractor companies, so machinery and the promise of technology were part of the backdrop too.

That childhood turned into a question he has never quite stopped asking: what would it take to make farming less unpredictable? The answer led him a long way from home. Johal studied computer science and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning both a bachelor's and a master's degree, with a minor in economics. MIT, by his account, opened his eyes to what technology - and later artificial intelligence - could do for an industry as old and as stubborn as agriculture.

For a while, the path did not look like farming at all. Over more than 25 years, Johal built and ran digital-first organizations across a striking range of industries: semiconductors, financial services, consumer retail, and clean energy. He served as CEO of Agni Corporation, a venture focused on clean technology and renewable energy. Each stop taught a version of the same lesson - that data, applied carefully, could turn guesswork into decisions.

Building the plumbing for farming

Then he pointed all of it back at agriculture. Johal founded Agralogics, a big-data software company built for the food ecosystem, an early attempt to treat food and farming as an information problem as much as a physical one. The work put him at the center of a growing movement to modernize how food gets grown, tracked, and moved.

In 2021 he took on a role that revealed how he thinks. He became the founding Executive Director of AgStack, a project of the nonprofit Linux Foundation, tasked with building open-source digital infrastructure for global food and agriculture. The idea borrowed directly from the software world: just as open-source code became shared plumbing for computing, AgStack would be free, re-usable digital infrastructure that any farmer, company, government, or researcher could build on.

It was a notably un-proprietary ambition for a career technologist. Johal has consistently described himself less as a disruptor and more as a long-term partner - "a long-term data and technology partner for farmers, advisors and agriculture companies," in his words. His stated view on AI is equally grounded: technology should enhance farming expertise, not replace it.

Semios, and the making of Almanac

In October 2023, Johal took the helm of Semios, a Vancouver-based precision-agriculture company known for combining AI, big data, and connected sensors to help specialty-crop growers - almonds, apples, grapes, citrus - predict pests, monitor weather, and manage water. Semios had grown into an industry heavyweight partly through acquisition, including a roughly $100 million purchase of the farm-management platform Agworld, plus companies like Centricity and Altrac.

That created a branding problem Johal decided to solve head-on. Some customers knew the company as Semios; others knew it as Agworld. In late 2024 he unified them under a single name, Almanac, and launched an AI platform called Alma that pulls together field data, weather, and expert analysis to hand growers specific, usable answers. He has described Alma in the plainest possible terms - "a Siri or Alexa for agriculture." Under the Almanac banner, the combined platform reached more than 100 million acres of farmland worldwide. The company also acquired the intellectual property and assets of Gro Intelligence to deepen its analytics.

Full Harvest and the agentic bet

His next chapter brought him to Full Harvest, the San Francisco B2B marketplace that spent a decade connecting growers with commercial buyers to move surplus and imperfect produce that might otherwise be wasted. The company earned real recognition for that mission - Fast Company named it the number one World Changing Idea in Food, and the World Economic Forum tagged it a Technology Pioneer. Johal stepped in as CEO, succeeding founder Christine Moseley, who moved to the board as the company entered its second decade.

The mandate is expansion. Where Full Harvest built a decade of proprietary supply-chain data, Johal's plan is to layer what the company calls "agentic orchestration" - AI agents working across procurement, compliance, logistics, and finance - on top of it. "Our vision is to harness the AI-era's promise to enable every stakeholder in the global food supply chain to thrive in an increasingly uncertain world," he has said. It is, in a sense, the AgStack philosophy applied to a commercial marketplace: keep the grower at the center, and use technology to remove friction rather than people.

Across five industries and at least four company names, the through-line is easy to miss and hard to unsee once you notice it. Agralogics, AgStack, Semios, Almanac, Full Harvest - different logos, one idea. The farmer, and the question from the dinner table, still sit at the center.