Migrant workers are a critical workforce for US farms, but getting them here with the proper H-2A visas can be complicated, and compliance around these workers is taxing on farms. Seso was founded five years ago to help streamline this process and is now looking to expand into a single HR platform for the agriculture industry.
Michael Guirguis co-founded the startup after his cousin asked his advice on whether to expand her organic farm. Despite the demand for her crop, Guirguis, whose entire career has been about job creation and the labor market, said expanding would not be smart because the industry’s labor shortage would make it difficult to hire enough workers. This inspired Guirguis to found Seso to automate the H-2A visa process to help solve this problem and help farms stay compliant. Once he started talking to potential farm clients, he realized that farms could use a lot more help with their human resources than just finding workers.
“When it comes to the back office, every farm we visited had thousands of filing cabinets,” Guirguis said. “It’s one of the most backward industries in the U.S. That was an eye-opener. We can address the workforce shortage and create a modern end-to-end operating system starting with HR and modernizing 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 Angel, several Seso clients and others. The company doubled its client base in 2023 and works with 27 of the top 100 agricultural employers in the US
While agriculture is a huge industry ripe for disruption, it has been relatively reticent to adopt new technology, he said. Guirguis believes Seso has been successful in farm sales so far, while many other startups haven’t, because Seso isn’t trying to change the actual farming process, something his farmers made clear they weren’t ready for yet. Back office technology adoption is an easier sell.
“Your HR team is in the back office doing traditional HR work,” Guirguis said. “For him we are trying to change behaviour, which is easier than for someone 50 years in the field who is still using pen and paper. They can still continue to do their procedure. We have created products for customization. You can take a picture of one [handwritten] timesheet, then use AI to make sure it’s accurate.”
Guirguis’ focus on getting direct feedback from farmers is what prompted Nina Achadjian, a partner at Index Ventures, to invest. Achajian initially passed on Seso when she first tried to raise from Index, but how the company sells and interacts with farmers changed her mind.
“I remember this call from a customer, it gave me chills,” Ahajian told TechCrunch. “[He said], “I get invited by these Silicon Valley entrepreneurs all the time and they show up at your farm and say, ‘Here’s how you should run their business.’ I always ask each of them to come and spend a day and work with me so they understand what a day in the life of the end customer is and they never show up. Michael was the only one who showed up at 4am in the freezing cold, in the dark, to pick artichokes.”
This feedback from farmers is why the company is expanding into payroll automation next. Guirguis said because of the various agricultural employment laws, farm payroll is incredibly complicated. Workers are paid for how much crop they harvest, Guirguis said, and the percentage for each crop harvested is different for a migrant worker versus a domestic worker, and different again if migrant workers and domestic workers harvest from the same field. Guirguis sees many ways to expand after that.
