From Design Shop to Solutions Company: How Sento Builds Agro-Industrial IoT Across Five Countries
Most IoT projects don’t fail because the hardware doesn’t work. They fail because the data it produces doesn’t change anything.
The gap between sensor readings and actionable insight is where value gets lost. In agro-industrial environments, the conditions are demanding, the stakes are high, and the people who need the information are rarely sitting at a desk.
Sento have spent a decade building connected solutions for companies operating in this industry. They started as a hardware design shop and now operate as a full-stack solutions business, operating across Latin America and the US. The shift in how they think about their work tells you something important about where IoT development is heading.
Who are Sento?
Sento builds connected solutions for the agro-industrial sector, serving farms, industrial plants, and food and animal protein processing facilities across Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, and the United States. Their platform integrates sensors, gateways, and devices connected to industrial equipment, feeding a unified system that processes measurements and turns them into something useful for the people running those operations.
As Germán Suárez, Sento’s co-founder, describes it: “We integrate IoT hardware — sensors, gateways, devices connected to other kinds of equipment — and we have a platform that unifies all that information and helps process and digest those measurements and generate insights.”
The Challenges of Building for the Real World
Two interlocking challenges shaped how Sento operates, and why they changed their approach.
The first is multi-country complexity. Deploying the same solution across Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, and the US means dealing with different cellular carriers, different frequencies, different certification requirements, and different connection management logic per country, per network.
“With other modules, we needed to develop all the logic for the communication process, the connection establishment with the local provider, and it changed a lot,” Germán explains.
Every new geography meant revisiting the connectivity layer. It was work that had to be done, but it wasn’t work that made Sento better at solving their customers’ problems.
The second challenge is the deployment environment itself. Even when connectivity is technically solved, the conditions in the field create their own demands. Consider one of Sento’s use cases: measuring pH levels in water tanks on animal farms. The water supply varies significantly by season; during heavy rainfall it carries far more sediment and particulate matter from the surrounding land. Sensors and devices need to be designed to handle those conditions reliably.
As Germán puts it: “The biggest challenge in IoT is not integrating the sensor, it’s understanding the process.”
With significant engineering effort going into managing connectivity across geographies and adapting to field conditions, there was less capacity left for more valuable work: deeply understanding the customer’s industrial process and building something that improves how they operate.
What Changed When Sento Started Working with Blues
Blues addresses the multi-country connectivity problem with pre-certified hardware across carriers and geographies. Sento no longer had to own the connection management layer on a market-by-market basis.
“With the Notecard we have a very transparent solution across different countries,” says Germán.
With connectivity sorted, Sento’s engineering capacity could move upstream toward understanding the customer’s process, adapting equipment to challenging deployment conditions, and building exceptional front-end experiences.
This is where Sento’s evolution from hardware company to solutions business accelerated. Rather than taking custom design requirements and building to spec, Sento started identifying the business problem, and delivering the entire solution: hardware, connectivity, platform, and insights.
Germán describes the philosophy that now underpins how they build: “Customers don’t need data, they need insights and a front-end solution. We focus on the solution, on how users use the data, and we have partners like Blues who don’t require us to invest a lot of engineering in the back end.”
Join the Conversation
For IoT solution builders, hardware engineers, and product leaders working in agriculture or industrial markets, especially those navigating multi-country deployments or connectivity gaps in remote environments, Sento’s journey from hardware design shop to full-stack solutions company offers practical, hard-won insight that’s difficult to find anywhere else.
Join Sento and Blues for a fireside chat on Thursday, April 30th at 2 PM ET / 6 PM GMT, where we’ll dive into:
- How Sento evolved from building custom hardware to delivering end-to-end IoT solutions focused on business outcomes
- What it takes to deploy the same IoT solution across multiple countries with different carriers, certifications, and infrastructure constraints
- How Blues’ cellular plus satellite Notecard is opening up deployments in locations with no cellular coverage
- How AI is accelerating IoT development, and why hardware expertise is becoming a stronger competitive differentiator, not a weaker one
Register now for “One Platform, Five Countries: How Sento Builds Agro-Industrial IoT Across Borders”
Can’t make it? Register anyway and we’ll send you the recording.