Why cannabis, why outdoors, why here

Three reasons at once.

• A real medical need. Portugal ships out far more medical cannabis than it makes available to its own patients. On our reading of the export and dispensing figures, around 647 times more.
• A crop that pays for the instrumentation. Sequencing and sensing never pencil out on a commodity crop. They do on this one, and the methods transfer down afterwards.
• An unusually good biological model. Clonal propagation lets us hold a genotype constant while the season varies. The plant gives dozens of measurable cannabinoid and terpene readouts. And pharmaceutical-grade cultivation legally requires the per-plant record that every other agricultural-AI company has to ask a farmer for.

Cannabis is not incidental to Siren, and it is not all of Siren. It is the right first crop.

Because you cannot learn a climate in a sealed room.

• Indoor cultivation exists to remove variance. That variance is what we are trying to model.
• Outdoor is far lower-carbon and lower-cost. One crop a year, March to October.
• It is harder, and a bad season is a real season. That is why the data is worth having.

Today, honestly: an agriculture company that trains data and tests hardware. Stage one earns from flower. Stage two is platform revenue from the tools the farm proves out, around 2028 to 2029. Four things join the stages.

• Cash. Flower revenue funds the engineering years.
• Data. Every season adds labelled records that cannot be bought.
• Model training. The farm is the ground truth.
• Hardware testing. Sensors run on our own crop first.

The farm is not a side business. It is the instrument.

• It is home, and the land was securable.
• The Dão is a serious growing region. Granite soils, shelter from the Caramulo and Estrela ranges, and a wide swing between day and night temperature. For a plant whose value sits in its volatile chemistry, that swing matters.
• The jobs and the spending land in a part of Portugal that needs them.

Almost nothing we are building is cannabis-specific. Three systems are in development.

• Sprout Heavy. Cultivation intelligence.
• Pluvora. Water and irrigation.
• Plantologist. Plant health and propagation.

All three are pre-release, with first field trials in 2027 on our own crop. The methods transfer to medicinal plants, hops and aromatics, and the water and plant-health work reaches into nurseries, reforestation and managed turf.

No, and we will not say we are until we are. Our cultivation licence application is filed with INFARMED, Portugal's medicines regulator. It has been submitted. It has not been issued. We plan for delay rather than assuming approval.