The OneCup AI tale is almost purposefully counterintuitive. The company’s technology is advanced enough to follow each animal’s health, activity, and calving behavior around-the-clock and can identify individual animals in a herd in the same way that face recognition recognizes people in a crowd. However, the concept that gave rise to it originated in a setting as relaxed and analogous as a family campfire in Saskatchewan. There, a ranching cousin voiced a grievance regarding the physical ear tags that have been the customary means of identifying individual livestock for many generations. The question that naturally followed was: could you just use cameras instead?
The CEO of OneCup AI, Mokah Shmigelsky, was raised close to Calgary and had a large family who farmed in the Canadian prairies. She proposed to her husband Geoff, who manages the technical aspects of the business, at that family gathering. Yes, he replied. The agricultural technology community has been genuinely interested in what transpired after that conversation: the system was developed, tested on relatives’ cattle, launched commercially in 2022, won the business of the year award at the Animal AgTech Awards at the Canadian Western Agribition in Regina in November 2023, and deployed 140 setups across Canada.
Important Information
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Founder | Mokah Shmigelsky — CEO, OneCup AI; grew up near Calgary; extended family has been in ranching and farming for generations |
| Co-Founder / Tech Lead | Geoff Shmigelsky — Mokah’s husband; described by Mokah as the technical brains behind the company |
| Company | OneCup AI — Alberta-based agriculture technology company |
| Product | BETSY — Bovine Expert Tracking and Surveillance; uses computer vision and AI cameras to identify individual cattle, monitor health, calving, feeding, and activity |
| Origin Story | Idea conceived at a family reunion campfire in Saskatchewan; a cousin asked whether cattle identification tags could be replaced with cameras and computers |
| On Market Since | 2022 |
| Deployments | 140 setups across Canada as of late 2023 |
| Award | Business of the Year at the Animal AgTech Awards, Canadian Western Agribition, Regina — November 2023 |
| Technology | Computer vision / facial recognition applied to individual cattle — identifies animals, detects calving, monitors health signals, sends text alerts to producers |
| Notable User | Ashley Perepelkin — Alberta cattle producer; city-raised, now runs a 100-cow herd using BETSY for calving monitoring and health alerts |
| Industry Context | Launched to address lack of permanent traceable identification in the livestock industry; eliminates need for physical ear tags for individual identification |
BETSY, or Bovine Expert Tracking and Surveillance, is the name of the system. Shmigelsky has compared the system to a “nanny” for cattle, which is perhaps why the word has a certain warmth to it. In reality, BETSY installs cameras in pastures and barns, trains an AI model to identify individual animals in a herd using computer vision, and then continuously monitors those animals, tracking activity levels, feeding habits, health indicators, and the particular behavioral cues that signal an impending calving or an illness.
BETSY notifies the producer via text message when it detects a cow in the early stages of labor. Instead of putting on boots and walking to a chilly barn to manually inspect, the producer could use a phone app at two in the morning.
Because calving season is the most labor-intensive time in a cattle operation and the one when human exhaustion most directly translates into lost animals, that particular feature—the calving alert—is the one that appeals to working ranchers the most. Ashley Perepelkin, a cattle producer in Alberta who has been utilizing the technology for her herd of roughly 100 cows, put it simply: she had to get up every three or four hours during the night to check on her cows and search for the minor physical signals that labor was starting.
When cows contract their tails, they form a certain shape that is almost exactly the same as when they urinate or defecate. Differentiating between the two in dim light while half-awake on a January night in Alberta is precisely the kind of challenge that sounds doable in theory but is draining in reality. She doesn’t have to since BETSY takes care of it.
Since the company’s founding, Shmigelsky has argued more broadly that there is a traceability issue in the livestock sector. The current norm for individual identification is physical ear tags, which need handling the animal, can be misplaced, and rely on human interpretation.
You can develop a health-monitoring platform on top of a permanent, constant, non-contact identification layer that is created by a computer vision system that knows individual cattle in the same way that your phone recognizes your face. That’s what BETSY is. According to Shmigelsky, dairy farmers are interested not only in calving warnings but also in monitoring milk production trends and seeing animals whose behavior indicates they might be ill before symptoms show up.
A variation of this story—the creator recognizes an issue, uses technology, and grows quickly—fits perfectly into a Silicon Valley narrative. OneCup AI is intriguing since it was tested on family cattle in Saskatchewan before it was ever introduced to an investor, and the problem-spotting was done in a ranching context by someone who had lived there her entire life.
Historically, engineers have prioritized the development of agricultural technology over farmers, and a persistent source of conflict in the industry has been the discrepancy between what the technology can accomplish and what farmers truly require. The conflict gave rise to Shmigelsky’s business. This is likely the reason why, in her words, the producers who have been utilizing BETSY are not just enthusiastic but also consistently offering suggestions to make it better. They were consulted prior to the product’s creation. It does because of them.