Built by vineyard owners for vineyard owners.
We're a vineyard technology company working quietly alongside growers in California, Oregon, Mexico, Italy, Armenia and beyond. Our founders grow and make wine; this product is the one we wished existed.
Twenty years of spreadsheets, pinned to a wall.
Sentinel was born from a simple observation: the world's finest vineyards were making critical decisions from clipboards, Excel workbooks, and memory.
Our team had spent years walking vineyard rows -- scouting for Leafroll, flagging Red Blotch symptoms with plastic tape, guessing at cluster counts, and watching the institutional knowledge walk out the gate every time a crew foreman retired.
Drones and satellites promised a solution, but NDVI maps stop at the canopy. A vine with Red Blotch can look identical to a shaded, under-irrigated, or simply young vine from above. The ground truth -- the actual condition of the plant -- was still trapped in peoples' heads.
What we built.
Sentinel is an end-to-end vine-level management system. Drop every vine once with sub-centimeter GNSS. Attach disease status, phenology, yield estimates, photos, and lab results. Issue vine-specific work orders that auto-update as work is completed. Analyze trends across vintages.
We operate out of Spongy Mesophyll Technologies -- named for the layer of leaf tissue where photosynthesis, transpiration, and most pathogens quietly do their work. Invisible, essential, and the foundation of everything above.
What we believe about vineyard data.
Ground truth beats aerial guesses.
A vine's condition is something a human confirms, not an algorithm. We build tools that make confirming fast -- not tools that pretend pixels are plants.
Data has to live longer than crews.
Vineyards outlive employees. The institutional memory of which vine was grafted when, and why, has to survive in a system -- not a crew foreman's head.
Precision is a practice, not a product.
Sub-centimeter accuracy is meaningless if the workflow around it is painful. We obsess over the walk-up loop: the vine, the phone, the record, back to work.
A small team, deeply embedded.
Shawn DeMartino
A decade managing premier Napa estates -- where he served as Director of Viticulture for a cult Cabernet producer. Sentinel began as the spreadsheet he kept pinned to the cellar wall. He now runs the company from the vineyard side of the fence.
- Prior
- Director of Viticulture · Premier Napa Estates
- Education
- Harvard, A.B. '14
- Based
- Napa Valley, CA
Christian Sidak
Formerly a product manager and engineer at Palantir, where he shipped data platforms for customers operating in harder conditions than a vineyard row. Leads Sentinel's geospatial stack, offline-first mobile capture, and the sync model that ties field data to web analytics.
- Prior
- Palantir Technologies
- Education
- Harvard, A.B. '17
- Languages
- Eleven, and counting