Why does Sirdar sell only through partners? The 2018 decision and what it changed

Where did Sirdar start?

With sensors on a container terminal in 2014.

Priya Ashford, Sadia Morales and I founded Sirdar in Seattle that year and deployed the first Halo-generation site sensors at a container terminal. The sensors needed protecting, so in 2016 we shipped the first Sentinel release to secure installed sensor networks. For a few years early customers bought Sentinel on its own, and it was the product people knew us for.

What did the first robot deployments teach us?

Two things, both uncomfortable.

The first was that our product only worked when the people installing it understood the site better than we did. A sensor network on a terminal is a civil-engineering problem, a networking problem and a labour-relations problem before it is a sensing problem. We were good at the last one.

The second was that the security had to be built into the machines, not bolted on afterwards. That lesson is why, in 2020, Sentinel became the security built into every Sirdar site, with existing Sentinel customers keeping their subscriptions and support.

Why 100% channel, and why 2018?

Because a halfway channel is the worst of both.

Companies that sell direct and through partners end up competing with their own partners for the best accounts, and partners respond by holding back the people and the investment the product needs. In 2018 we stopped selling direct entirely and moved to 100% channel sales with our first 40 partners. From that day, if a customer called Sirdar, the answer was the name of a partner.

We chose 2018 because the first forty partners were ready and we were not yet large enough for the change to be impossible. A company that waits until the channel is convenient never makes the change at all.

Did that slow the company down?

For a while. Then it did the opposite.

In 2019 we acquired Kinetic Robotics of Monterrey and mobile manipulation joined the portfolio. The partners who had learned to install Halo and Sentinel were the ones who could commission a robot fleet safely, and the signed safety case became the standard because partners were already writing site arguments for their customers. In 2021 the Halo H-series precision nodes shipped and the Atlas program began. The first Atlas release became generally available in 2023. Aether shipped in 2024, the same year the Sirdar Partner Network relaunched with four tiers. In 2025 the Kinetic M4 became generally available and we signed our 200th partner.

How does a sale work today?

Every sale goes through a partner, whoever finds it.

Of our bookings, 58% are found by partners, through their own customers and their own regions. The rest are found by Sirdar, by our regional teams or by inbound interest, and handed to a partner to sell, install and support. We do not keep a direct book. The network is 224 partners, three of them Authorized Distributors, across seven regions: North America, LATAM, EMEA, APAC, ANZ, India and the Middle East.

What does Sirdar do, if partners sell and install?

We build the stack and we commission the standard.

Product and engineering build Kinetic, Halo, Atlas, Aether and Sentinel. Safety, operations and regional partner teams commission and support each site alongside the partner. Sirdar publishes the commissioning standards, the Safety Case Standard and the certification material partners train on, and holds the certifications a customer can check: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, IEC 62443-4-1 for product security development, ISO 10218-1 and ISO 3691-4 for the Kinetic M4.

What is the measure of whether the decision was right?

The customers' own words, which all name the partner.

Vale Norte Mining's safety director: the partner documented every site boundary. Nordvik Steel's plant manager: the signed safety case made deployment practical. Port of Halvard's operations director: we can measure every handoff before a robot moves. None of those sentences is about Sirdar. That is the point. The name is a reminder we chose in 2014, and the 2018 decision was the day we meant it.

What has not changed?

The three founders still hold the CEO, COO and Chief Product Officer seats, the company is privately held and majority owned by its founders, and headquarters is still at Halvard Quay in Seattle. We have 9,400 employees and 31,000 customer sites, and we still do not sell direct.

Last updated 2026-09-30.