Eleven years running broiler houses. Now building the record every house should have.
PoultraIQ is the software company built out of MINA FARMS LLC and more than a decade of commercial broiler grow-out. The people who ran the houses are the people building the instrument.
A model that lives in one head.
MINA FARMS LLC ran commercial broiler houses for eleven years. A broiler house is not managed from a spreadsheet. It is managed through air, water, feed, litter, sound, equipment, weather, labor, and a running mental model of what normal looks like for this house and this flock — a model that lives almost entirely in the head of whoever walked it last.
That model is the most valuable instrument on the farm and the least durable. It leaves when the person leaves. It degrades across a long cycle. It does not transfer cleanly at shift handoff. And it fails in exactly the situation where it matters most: a change small enough to look ordinary on the day it starts.
Over more than a decade of grow-out, that model was carried by a team that delivered every step of the way — placement, brooding, ventilation through weather that would not cooperate, market weight, catch, cleanout, and turnaround, cycle after cycle. The knowledge is real because the flocks were real, and because the people who built it are still here.
What we hold is a specific and unusually detailed list of the moments where better information, delivered a day earlier, would have changed the outcome — and enough operating memory to know which fields in a daily log actually predict something and which are noise. That is why we are not guessing at the schema. This is a transition of the same expertise into a form that does not depend on any one person being in the right house at the right hour.
From running houses to building the instrument.
PoultraIQ is not trying to be a broad agricultural technology company, because breadth is how this category keeps failing. The first job is deliberately narrow: take the record a grower already keeps and make it notice things. That is also the only stage that generates the dataset every later stage depends on, which is why it comes first and why we are in no hurry to announce the rest.
The company is small, self-funded, and pursuing public research funding, so that the growers who run PoultraIQ Daily first are not the ones paying for the measurement. It is looking for pilot partners, research collaborators, and advisory clients.
Shakeel Ahsan
Shakeel Ahsan spent eleven years running a commercial broiler operation — placements, feed and water records, ventilation, litter, mortality logs, and the settlement sheet at the end of every flock. He has kept the daily production charts this product is built to read, by hand, for over a decade.
His professional background is in enterprise systems and data architecture: designing and implementing the operational and ERP platforms that large organizations run on, and the integration and reporting layers that turn scattered operational records into something a manager can act on. That is the same problem a poultry house has, at a different scale.
PoultraIQ comes out of the overlap. Most people who understand broiler production do not build software, and most people who build agricultural software have never filled in a mortality column at six in the morning. Based in Washington, DC.
Arshad Khan
Arshad Khan has spent more than twelve years leading enterprise technology and transformation programmes for corporate, government, and international organizations across Africa, Asia, North America, and the Middle East. His work is enterprise architecture, data governance, and programme delivery — including taking over programmes that had already failed once and getting them into service.
Most of that work was done in conditions that resemble a poultry farm more than they resemble a technology office: unreliable connectivity, users who did not ask for new software, and a system that has to keep working when nobody from the vendor is in the building. That is the operating constraint PoultraIQ is designed around.
The division of responsibility is deliberate. Shakeel knows what happens inside a house. Arshad knows what it takes to make software survive in the field once it leaves the demo.
Dr. Sajid Farooq
Sajid Farooq holds a PhD in real-time rendering from the University of Glasgow and has spent two decades building platforms at scale. At Nike he was Director of Innovation, where he led the team that built the company’s Omniverse platform with NVIDIA and ran the group that carried ideas from proof of concept through incubation to production. Before that he was a Principal Engineer at Microsoft, working on Unreal Engine and mixed-reality graphics, and then Principal Product Manager for DirectX.
The relevant part of that record is not the graphics. It is that he has repeatedly built the layer underneath a product — the architecture, the real-time data path, the parts that have to keep running long after the demo is over. He designed that layer for a cloud AI platform as its VP of AI Platform, and he grew an engineering organization from three people to more than forty across three countries as a CTO. He also spent six years as a professor of game programming at Champlain College. He is based in Virginia, where he now runs a technology studio of his own.
A digital twin of a poultry house is the same class of problem at a different scale: a continuously updated model of a physical space, fed by live data, that has to be correct enough to make a decision against. Sajid chairs the technical advisory board. He reviews architecture and platform direction, and he is the person who argues about what the system should not attempt. The role is advisory and non-executive.
Dr. Saaid Farooq, DVM
Saaid Farooq is a veterinarian. He earned his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine at The Agriculture University Peshawar, where his research covered Newcastle disease and infectious bronchitis — two of the conditions an early-warning system is meant to catch before a grower can see them in the birds. He holds an MS in Biomedical Sciences from Iowa State University.
He spent a year with MINA FARMS as Poultry Health and Biosecurity Coordinator, monitoring flock health, developing biosecurity procedure, and keeping the kind of production record this product is built to read. He is now pursuing a PhD in Comparative Biomedical Sciences at the University of Maryland, in the Department of Veterinary Medicine — the Maryland campus of the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine — where his research area is immunology.
That work sits directly upstream of what this product assumes. A bird mounts a response to a challenge before anyone standing in the house can see that something is wrong, and the gap between those two moments is the entire window PoultraIQ is trying to operate in. Saaid advises on flock health, and on the line between what a number in a log book can suggest and what it cannot support as a veterinary conclusion. The advisory role is unpaid and non-executive.
Technology earns trust only when it respects the farm.
Every product decision is tested against one question: does this make a poultry operation easier to understand, easier to manage, or easier to improve? If the answer is not immediate and specific, it is not ready.
Bring us a house and a problem.
The most useful first conversation describes what you run, what you already record, and what you wish you had known sooner.