Matthew Rooda, SwineTech’s co-founder and CEO, was born in Kinston, North Carolina, and raised in southeast Iowa as a fourth-generation pork producer. From an early age, he was immersed in the realities of production, gaining hands-on experience across family farms and commercial sow operations. During college, he continued working in production in a management role while also being exposed to emerging technologies in healthcare settings.
At the same time, technologies like artificial intelligence were rapidly advancing, creating new ways for people to interact with machines. One of the most visible examples was voice recognition, with tools like Amazon Alexa demonstrating how systems could listen, interpret, and respond in real time. That shift introduced a new line of thinking. Anyone who has spent time in a farrowing barn recognizes the sound of a piglet in distress, often caused by being laid on and crushed by its mother, one of the leading causes of mortality. If a person can recognize that moment by sound, could a system be trained to do the same? As voice recognition technologies evolved, the opportunity to detect distress in real time and intervene became increasingly viable.
In 2015, Matthew Rooda, Abraham Espinoza, and John Rourke founded SwineTech to pursue that idea. Participation in the Iowa Startup Accelerator, along with early recognition from institutions such as Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Microsoft, and the American Farm Bureau Federation, helped build momentum and secure the funding needed to bring the vision to life. Through research, on-farm trials, and validation with institutions like Kansas State University, the team proved pigs in distress could be identified and acted on in real time.
That work led to SmartGuard, a voice recognition and wearable technology designed to reduce piglet crushing. As the company grew, team members including Adam Magstad, Ben White, Dylan Sharp, Tim Westphal, and Joe Palermo played key roles in refining the technology for commercial conditions and ensuring it could deliver consistent results at scale. Their work transformed SmartGuard from a proven concept into a commercial solution that reduced piglet mortality from crushing by 32 percent across multiple sites.
Saving a pig in a moment of distress did not guarantee survival. Outcomes still depended on everything that followed, including how consistently protocols were executed, how well teams communicated, and how much visibility existed across daily operations. These elements were often breaking down. Labor shortages made consistency difficult to maintain. Data lacked the integrity required to support decision-making. Infrastructure limitations prevented new technologies from scaling effectively across farms.
The innovation was working. The system around it was not.
When COVID intensified these pressures, the team leaned in rather than stepping back. Over several months, they conducted hundreds of interviews with producers, managers, and frontline workers and reviewed hundreds of hours of on-farm video to understand where breakdowns were occurring. A consistent pattern emerged. Work was inconsistent, communication was fragmented, documentation was unreliable, and execution varied widely across people and sites. The issue was not a series of isolated events, but the system itself. Consistent outcomes required coordinated workflows, structured communication, and visibility into execution. To better understand how to address this, the team studied how complex healthcare environments manage similar challenges, working alongside organizations such as Mercy Hospitals and the University of Iowa Hospitals to learn how people, processes, and accountability align to deliver consistent care.
In 2020, SwineTech made a decisive pivot and created PigFlow, a system for managing how work gets done at the point of care across every stage of production. Rather than adding another layer of technology, PigFlow redefined how operations are run, bringing structure, visibility, and accountability to daily execution.
Today, PigFlow is used across all major stages of pork production and supports operations throughout North America, Australia, and Europe. Producers are seeing measurable improvements in performance, labor efficiency, and overall outcomes. That impact has driven significant growth, with SwineTech named to the Inc. 5000 list in 2025, ranking 247 among the fastest-growing companies in North America.
At its core, this work is not about technology. It is about people.
We believe the future of agriculture will be defined by how well we empower people to deliver better care.
The change that we are bringing to animal agriculture is a team effort. SwineTech’s mission could not be possible without the many team members, investors, producers, partners, and mentors that have supported us along the way.
