You are Valentina Ospina, innovation manager at AgroSensa, a 78-person farm-sensor company in Medellín. A cheaper Brazilian rival reaches your customers in five months, a Spanish distributor offers you Europe if you are certified in nine, and your research budget covers little more than half of what your engineers are asking for. Before the end of May you have to tell the founders what the problem is.
The situation
AgroSensa, founded in 2017, sells soil and micro-climate sensors with an analytics subscription that helps about 430 mid-size farms schedule irrigation and inputs. In 2025 it booked COP$18.500 millones of revenue (Colombian usage: the dot marks thousands) at a 6% EBITDA margin. 60% of revenue is recurring subscription, and that line pays for research. It holds two granted patents, and your name is among the inventors on both.
On 11 May 2026 you have two documents on the table. A venture-backed Brazilian competitor announces it is entering Colombia with a cheaper sensor and will price below the incumbents; its distributors will be selling in about five months. A Spanish agricultural distributor offers exclusive distribution across the European Union if you deliver a CE-certified product within nine months.
The annual research budget is COP$4.200 millones, the founders refuse to raise it, and six live projects already use it. Your engineers have priced four candidates: a next-generation sensor to answer the Brazilian, CE certification, an artificial-intelligence yield-prediction module and a low-cost "lite" sensor. Together they come to about COP$7.600 millones, 1.8 times the budget. The bank holds COP$2.400 millones, six months of payroll at the current burn.
Everyone in the company reads the same facts their own way. Iván Restrepo, co-founder and chief executive, sees the Spanish offer as the reward for nine years of work. The commercial director wants all the money on the domestic base and a polite, slow answer to Spain. The controller wants to know how many months of payroll the plan leaves standing.