Our story
Solanus grew out of a years-long collaboration between a software engineer and a wine production manager. Driven to learn and find new ways to improve the efficiency of wine production, we've built everything from spreadsheets to sensors together.
Our mission
We're making cutting-edge systems and software accessible to wineries of any size. Modern advancements in microcontroller and sensor technologies have pushed costs to historic lows, but many wineries still use antiquated systems that are expensive, failure-prone, and hard to monitor.
Our team
Genta Ohgushi
Genta has managed wine production for 8 years. During that time, he has worked with over 30 different wineries producing a wide range of wines in a variety of styles. From forklifting to team management to facility management, Genta has engaged with every aspect of wine production.
Over his time in production Genta found that he was spending endless time trying to keep track of everything in a winery. That is why he started working with his college friend Nick Budak to develop tech solutions to manage his wineries more efficiently. He started with remotely monitoring temperature and basin levels of his glycol systems in conjunction with a cloud dashboard and text alerts, but has since expanded to thermostats, tank level controllers, barrel room temperature and humidity controls, and much more. At a certain point, he knew it was time to offer these products to other wineries.
Genta also has a passion for creating efficient solutions for internal team workflows and client winemaking communication systems. Over the years, his solutions have saved countless hours of work, avoided costly mistakes, and elevated the quality of production.
genta@solanus.systems
Nick Budak
Nick started developing software as a side business during his time at Whitman College, in the heart of Washington’s wine country. Fast forward ten years, and his career has taken him from small clients to higher education’s leading engineering teams, including full-time positions at Princeton and Stanford.
Nick’s passion is crafting bespoke, dynamic interfaces for visualizing and querying data. At Stanford, he is responsible for maintaining both backend and frontend of a search engine that delivers more than 10 million items to the Stanford research community and general public.
The Internet of Things has enormous potential to revolutionize the wine industry, but the benefits of affordable sensors and microcontrollers aren’t being passed on to the consumer. Nick is excited to partner with Genta to bring cutting-edge technology to Washington’s wineries.
nick@solanus.systems