Immigrant workers are a critical workforce for American farms, but bringing them here with the proper H-2A visas can be complicated, and the compliance surrounding these employees is grueling for farms. Seso was founded five years ago to help streamline that process and is now looking to expand into a comprehensive human resources platform for the agricultural industry.
Michael Guirguis co-founded the startup after his cousin asked him for advice on whether or not his organic farm should expand. Despite the demand for his crops, Guirguis, whose entire career has involved job creation and the labor market, said expanding would not be wise because labor shortages in the industry would make it difficult to hire enough workers. That inspired Guirguis to found Seso to automate the H-2A Visa Process to help solve that problem and help farms comply. Once he started talking to potential farm clients, he realized that farms could use a lot more help with their human resources, beyond simply finding workers.
“As far as the administrative office goes, every farm we visited had thousands of file cabinets,” Guirguis said. “It is one of the most lagging industries in the United States. That was the revealing moment. “We can address the labor shortage and build a modern end-to-end operating system starting with HR and modernize a lot of these really complex tasks.”
The startup just raised $26 million to expand the capabilities of its platform. The Series B round was led by Bond's Mary Meeker with participation from Index Ventures, NFX, SV Angels, several Seso clients and others. The company doubled its customer base in 2023 and works with 27 of the 100 largest agricultural employers in the US.
While agriculture is a massive industry ripe for disruption, it has been relatively reluctant to adopt new technologies, he said. Guirguis believes Seso has been successful in selling to farms so far, when many other startups have not, because Seso is not trying to change the actual farming process, something farmers made clear to him they were not yet ready for. . Adopting back office technology is an easier sell.
“Your HR team is in the back office doing traditional HR work,” Guirguis said. “For them we are trying to change behavior, which is easier than for someone with 50 years in the field who still uses pencil and paper. They can still continue with their process. We have created products to adapt. “You can take a photo of a (handwritten) time sheet and then use ai to make sure it is accurate.”
Guirguis' focus on getting direct feedback from farmers is what prompted Index Ventures partner Nina Achadjian to invest. Achadjian initially overlooked Seso when she first tried to raise money from Index, but the way the company sells and interacts with farmers changed her mind.
“I remember a customer call and I got chills,” Achadjian told TechCrunch. “(He Said): 'These Silicon Valley entrepreneurs hit me up all the time and show up at your farm and say, 'This is how you should run your business.' I always ask each of them to come spend a day and work with me so they can understand what a day in the life of the end client is like and they never show up. 'Michael was the only one who showed up at 4 in the morning, in the freezing cold, in the dark, to pick artichokes.'”
That feedback from farmers is why the company is expanding into payroll automation. Guirguis said that due to various farm employment laws, farm payroll is incredibly complicated. Workers are paid by the amount of crop they pick, Guirguis said, and the rate for each crop picked is different for a migrant worker versus a domestic worker and different again if migrant workers and domestic workers pick from the same field. Guirguis sees numerous ways to expand after that.
