Founder Spotlight: Remi Schmaltz, CEO of Brilliant Harvest

October 2, 2024 • 5 min read

Ventures Team

Brilliant Harvest, an enterprise technology startup offering an AI-powered customer experience platform for equipment dealers, has come out of stealth mode. Founded in 2023 by Alberta-born entrepreneur Remi Schmaltz, this venture, in partnership with the AltaML Venture Studio, aims to transform heavy machinery innovation.

Schmaltz, who has successfully led two agriculture-focused businesses to exits with blue-chip companies, shares his background and how the founding of Brilliant Harvest—will strengthen dealer-customer relationships and streamline repetitive tasks.

It starts with having a very supportive wife as the starting point of a supportive family. I grew up on a farm. My brother and I took over our family agriculture retail business in the early 2000s, which my grandfather had started. At the time, it was struggling, so we focused on reinventing the business and grew it from about $15 million to over $30 million in revenue in five years. During that time, we incubated what became Decisive Farming, and spun it out in 2011. The retail business was then acquired by CHS, the large U.S. cooperative, in 2012.

Decisive Farming holds several patents around variable rate technology and is a farm management precision agriculture company. Our mandate was to scale an agronomist tenfold using software. This was before AI, there was no fancy stuff like that—just algorithms, workflow, and automation-type tools. We had three unsolicited acquisition attempts with the third in 2019 by TELUS, which was completely unsuspecting to us. We joined TELUS Agriculture in December of 2019, and I worked as part of their strategy team for a few years.

Your Family Has Been in the Agriculture Business for Over a Century. How Has That Accumulated Knowledge Shaped Your Business Decisions?

My ancestors came to North America in the 1800s with nothing. They arrived in the Dakotas with access to land and the hope of making something of it. They then moved to the Beiseker area, northeast of Calgary. Although they didn’t have much, they figured it out. Whenever I consider the risks we take today, I reflect on the risks my ancestors took—coming here and risking it all. I use their journey as level-setting for me when taking risks and thinking through situations.

I’ve learned a lot from working with family. At one point, I worked with about 11 family members. I worked most closely with my dad, Bruce, and my older brother, Tasha who was also my co-founder at Decisive Farming. Although he reported to me as the CEO, the dynamic was interesting. Even during tense conversations, we always figured it out because we genuinely knew and trusted that we were both trying to achieve the same goals. What’s most important, I’ve learned, is how to create alignment and approach problem-solving and creative thinking without boundaries.

What’s the Elevator Pitch for Brilliant Harvest?

Brilliant Harvest is an AI-powered customer experience platform for equipment. We’re tapping into a $15 billion revenue opportunity with a dealer-branded app that covers everything from purchase to operational support and repair. We’re focused on the agriculture and construction industry since it is often the same dealers. This platform is for the dealer’s team and their customers, allowing them to be self-served 24/7 at their convenience, whether on the buy or support side.

What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

One of the biggest challenges for dealerships is talent—finding good people. It can take years to find the right people. Dealerships invest significant capital to train them, and the challenge is that you can lose talent quite easily. So, how do you make talent happier, the team more scalable, and, in doing so, create happier customers? A good example would be: if I’m a farmer in my tractor at 11 p.m., seeding, and I’m searching for information on an issue with my monitor. I try texting or calling the support person. There is a good chance they are not available, sleeping, or helping someone else, but the result is I get shut down and can’t do what I need to do operationally. This provides an alternative where you can quickly open an app on your phone, ask an AI assistant about the equipment you’re operating and the problem you have, and find answers. It also incorporates the support person assigned to you from the dealership into the conversation. It’s not just about you and an AI assistant; it’s about you, the AI assistant, and the team at the dealership that supports your business.

The same applies at the dealership. You have lots of new employees who are green or junior, trying to figure things out. So the question becomes, how do you provide training to get them up to speed faster? And for a lot of salespeople at dealerships, the challenge is knowing everything about every piece of equipment. It’s not uncommon for the customer to be more informed than the salesperson about a particular piece of equipment they are focused on. Or, again, farmers work odd hours. How do you allow them to self-serve, get the answers they need, and stay operational and efficient with their time?

Coming out of Stealth, What Are You Hoping to Achieve in the Months Ahead?

As we come out of stealth, it’s exciting to have commercialized a product, gained paying customers, and signed one of the largest dealers in North America as an early partner. We’re focused on ensuring the dealer’s team successfully adopts the technology. We’ll learn a lot from them, their users, and the feedback they provide. While we determine how many dealers to bring on, we want to follow a cautious ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach. I always believe in underpromising and overdelivering, so we’ll onboard a few more customers, ensure their success, and avoid getting too far ahead of ourselves.

Long-term, What’s the Opportunity You Foresee for Brilliant Harvest?

It’s a massive opportunity. As a mentor and investor in the space, I’ve looked at hundreds, if not thousands, of companies, and Brilliant Harvest is one of the few with the potential to truly scale and become a very large business. Agriculture is a tricky, highly consolidated market. There are plenty of innovators in the space, but achieving mass adoption and scale takes time. I believe that with the generational shift and recent technological advancements on the farm, we’re well-positioned for our technology to scale quickly and gain market adoption quickly.

For People Who Are Just Learning About Brilliant Harvest, What Is the One Takeaway You Want to Leave Them With?

Startups and new technologies don’t happen without one core starting point, and that’s the team. Unless you have the team to get it done, it doesn’t happen. I’m very proud of our team. There are five of us that have worked together in previous companies, we’ve been able to get out of the gate really fast. We know how to work together, we know how to create things, to work with customers, and we’ve built real successful companies. We all operate under the premise of honesty and integrity. Really focusing on making the equipment industry better is what drives us, and that reflects in the customers we want to work with as well.

For more information, reach out to Schmaltz directly at info@brilliantpowered.com or explore Brilliant Harvest and the portfolio of ventures within the AltaML Venture Studio.

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