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How University of Iowa dropouts built a global ag tech company
SwineTech co-founder Matthew Rooda recalls how he blended animal agriculture and health care technology to reduce piglet deaths and improve farm efficiency
Jan. 11, 2026 5:30 am
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CEDAR RAPIDS — Matthew Rooda began working in the swine industry at a young age. First, he helped his grandfather on a family farm, and later he worked with his father, who managed a commercial farm in Iowa.
When it was time for college, he enrolled at the University of Iowa with plans to study genetics and biotechnology, and eventually planned to go to medical school to become an obstetrician.
When Rooda met with the medical school admissions committee at the University of Iowa, he was told that he had to be different to stand out. He thought back to the experiences he had working on farms.
Rooda told the committee he had experience with vaccinations, birthing assistance and management on farms.
“They said, ‘That's exactly what we're looking for,’” he said.
His junior and senior years of college, Rooda worked at nursing homes and he noticed more connections between farming and health care.
He saw how nursing homes used technology and management practices to weed out inefficiencies in their care operations. Things started to click.
“There were a lot of technologies in the nursing home, specifically that help nurses and nurses’ aides be more efficient and provide more timely care,” Rooda said. “It was all driven by just standard day-to-day expectations, but also alerts that would come up from somebody falling or clicking a button asking for help, and you had medication administration all baked into the system. I thought that if we brought that over to the swine industry, that can be really helpful.”
Rooda, along with business partners Abraham Espinoza and John Rourke, launched SwineTech in 2015. The subscription-based service uses sensors and software to monitor piglets and prevent them from being crushed by their mothers.
Maternal overlay — the term for what happens when a sow accidentally lies down her piglets — is one of the leading causes of piglet mortality, accounting for about 40 percent of piglet deaths, according to an Iowa State University study.
While the scope of the business has changed over its first decade, SwineTech’s mission remains the same: to improve pig care and farm efficiency.
SwineTech’s path forward
Before it became an agricultural tech company, Rooda said SwineTech got its start thanks to an email.
The University of Iowa announced to students — via email — that it would award $3,000 for an original business idea.
Rooda and Espinoza pitched an idea to use voice recognition technology to prevent sows from rolling over on their piglets and killing them.
After clinching the prize, the business partners went through the University of Iowa’s student incubator and were recruited by Iowa Startup Accelerator to join its 2015 cohort. At the same time, Rooda and Espinoza brought John Rourke as a third co-founder to help them develop prototypes. Rourke was with the company as the director of research and development from 2015 through 2020.
The multi-week program’s goal of helping Iowa entrepreneurs grow their business ideas usually caps participation at 10 businesses, but it made an exception to invite SwineTech.
“They said, ‘We have our 10 teams, but we'll take you in as the 11th, but you have to let us know in 24 hours, and you're going to have to drop out of school,’” Rooda said. “It took the full 24 hours to make that decision, but we decided that we'd drop out of school to go through with this. We saw it as a once in a lifetime experience and opportunity and can always go back to school.”
Through the accelerator, they were able to create prototypes for wild, outdoor and indoor pig production.
Rooda and his partners took SwineTech to 31 business pitch competitions and won 27 of them, raking in about half a million dollars.
That “half a million dollars allowed us to go out and further validate our prototypes and our solution, and ultimately go raise a seed round of capital,” Rooda said. “That seed round was 2017, about $1.2 million.”
They didn’t stop there.
Through other pitch and business competitions, SwineTech raised another $5 million.
“What we found out during that time was we were incredibly effective at identifying a pig's getting rolled on by its mom, triangulating its position, alerting her to stand up with a vibration, and then even tracking her behavior with a wearable that we were using, and that was leading to about a 32 percent reduction in pig deaths, which is great, but we were starting to find in some of these commercial trials that producers weren't necessarily keeping all the pigs we saved alive,” Rooda said.
There were many reasons the piglets weren’t surviving, Rooda said, pointing to poor data, poor process compliance and even Mother Nature.
“We were running into this wall of, ‘What good is it to save a pig if you can’t keep it alive?’ and ‘What good is our product if we can’t be there to ensure that?’” Rooda said. “We were stuck. (We had) a working product that doesn’t actually solve the problem.”
Around that time, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With packing plants shutting down and businesses facing a crunch, Rooda said SwineTech had to “pivot or die.”
The team began working to incorporate a “holistic approach to data integrity, execution and compliance.”
“That's when we went to Mercy hospitals, met with their operations team, saw what they were doing, went back to the nursing home I'd worked in and spent some more time with that software, and took the whole point of care, patient management software solutions from health care and applied it to pig production,” Rooda said. “It just took off.”
By incorporating that holistic approach in their technology, SwineTech saw “dramatic improvements” in birthing assistance, which led to about 50 percent fewer stillborn piglets.
“It was also helping people from multiple countries better communicate with live translations and providing a little bit less stress to staff because they had a little bit more guidance on what needed to happen,” Rooda said. “It was very much a holistic workforce management solution that really tied to point of care.”
How SwineTech works
Today, in addition to monitoring sows to make sure they’re not crushing their babies, the company’s software also takes live production data from the animals in their pens and runs it through farm management protocols software, which gives clear instructions and care priorities for workers who are caring for the pigs.
SwineTech’s software PigFlow is a digital management platform that helps streamline farm operations by connecting employees, tasks and data to improve pig and piglet care and health outcomes.
PigFlow can be used throughout the pig’s life, but it focuses on the reproductive stages. Specifically, it focuses on breeding management, tracking which animals are more at risk for birthing complications and alerting farmers to those risks.
It guides farmers and staff through the birthing process and makes recommendations to them to reduce sow deaths and stillbirths.
The technology also helps farmers streamline piglet care by recommending vaccines and other post-birth treatments, while digitizing paperwork associated with the farm.
Despite the use of technology to guide animal health decisions, Rooda said SwineTech’s approach still allows farmers to make pen-side decisions.
SwineTech calls it “human-centered automation.”
“It's how can we automate as best as possible, helping the person understand when and where they need to be somewhere and then when they are pen-side, when they are at the point of care, that's when the human element kicks in. That's when I need to understand how to read the individual, read and assess the situation and provide the best care possible,” said Rooda, who is the company’s CEO.
He said this helps farmers spend more time prioritizing animal care and less time organizing data or coordinating farm personnel.
“If you get rid of all of those meaningless points of the day, you can allow that person to spend more time with that animal,” he said.
Rooda said the company mainly works with veterinary companies as a distribution resource because veterinarians often have strong connections with farm operations, helping the company get in front of farmers to encourage them to try the technology.
He said working with veterinary companies also keeps the company’s retention rates high.
“Since 2020, we've had about a 93 percent retention rate,” he said. “It's very rare a farm would subscribe to this and stop.”
Rooda said SwineTech is the first agriculture tech company of its kind.
Rooda said that he and the SwineTech team quickly learned that it is “impossible” to train farm staff to empathize with an animal when you don’t know what it is going through.
“I tried to emulate a solution based off what exists for people in health care when everyone else in the industry was trying to focus on data automation, and at the end of the day, taking that approach and putting people first was the winning recipe.”
Hitting new milestones
With their current model, SwineTech operates throughout the United States, as well as in Canada and Australia.
This year, the company will be expanding its reach to serve farms in Mexico and Spain, ranging from the smallest family farms to some of the biggest agricultural companies globally.
SwineTech also serves universities in the U.S., including Kansas State University and North Carolina State University.
Despite the success SwineTech has seen, Rooda said he looks back to the start of the business in 2015 and thinks he would’ve thought they’d be hitting these milestones earlier.
“We're doing really well, (between) being profitable and growing, but if I saw our financials today, I don't know if I would have taken the jump,” Rooda said. “There's the ignorance is bliss, like the world's your oyster. Like ‘Oh this can happen in just three years,’ but in agriculture, everything happens a little slower. It's a little more difficult.”
He said success for tech startup companies can be elusive, so having some ignorance walking into the business has been a benefit.
“It's such an advantage, in some ways, to be an ignorant kid at school, completely unaware of some of the brick walls you're going to have to run through,” Rooda said. “Because people who can solve these problems but know those walls (exist) don't solve the problem. It just seems too big of a mountain to climb.“
Olivia Cohen covers energy and environment for The Gazette and is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. She is also a contributing writer for the Ag and Water Desk, an independent journalism collaborative focusing on the Mississippi River Basin.
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Comments: olivia.cohen@thegazette.com
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