In 2023, Stephen Kaniewski left Nebraska-based agtech giant Valmont Industries after five years as CEO — and instead of jumping to another big business, took a turn to the startup world. His cousin, Greg Steinberg, had reached out for advice after inventing a new location technology that wasn’t dependent on GPS.

“The more that I got talking to him, the more excited about the idea I became, because there was nothing in the marketplace that was doing exactly what he was doing,” Kaniewski said.

“Once he was able to prove it to me — I call it getting over the Elizabeth Holmes syndrome (Holmes is a convicted fraud and founder of Theranos) — then I felt like it was a better time to get even more involved,” he said.

Kaniewski is now the co-founder and COO of iDvera, the startup commercializing Steinberg’s technology. While iDvera is technically based in Texas, where Steinberg lives, Kaniewski is staying in the Omaha metro, where he says the business community has been essential to help get the startup off the ground.

As iDvera grows, Kaniewski wants to hire in Omaha, leveraging local talent instead of being another company with Nebraska roots to effectively leave the state.

“We don’t have an intent necessarily to say, ‘Hey, we got to take people from Omaha and brain drain them over to Texas,’” Kaniewski said. “People value the Omaha connection themselves. There’s a lot of people that won’t move but are superior talent.”

Location tech for all industries

The technology behind iDvera uses commercially available sensors, combined with proprietary machine learning and math modeling of the Earth’s magnetic field, to confirm location as a backup to the Global Positioning System (GPS).

GPS uses satellites and receivers on the ground for location and navigation. That helps just about every industry run, from Google Maps and shipping companies to militaries around the world and banking security.

But GPS is no longer secure. It can be jammed and spoofed, causing chaos across business and government. Kaniewski referenced GPS jamming in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where military operators now use fiber-optic cables to tether directly to drones. Jamming attacks can also threaten flights.

In 2024, GPS spoofing led to truckloads of tequila being stolen from TV food star Guy Fieri. And Iran’s government used spoofing to degrade independent internet access as the country descended into protests earlier this year.

That means iDvera’s technology addresses a critical need, which is a helpful position to be in as a startup. “When you come into the market with something like that, and meetings are not a problem, that’s a nice feeling,” Kaniewski said.

“You’re not trying to hard sell,” he said. “Sometimes that happens with startups. They’re trying to overcome the way people think about the existing technology, and here it’s been much more (of an) open door.”

Leveraging Valmont experience and Nebraska culture

For Kaniewski, going from a large public corporation like Valmont to a startup is refreshing. “I was (a chief information officer) in a former life, and … technical things that are available to you today, whether that’s coding, user interfaces, even the hardware is so different than it was back then,” he said. “It’s been pretty invigorating.”

But Kaniewski is applying many of the lessons he learned at Valmont. He is keeping a close eye on funding and business strategy decisions to make sure the startup doesn’t end up wasting money while chasing ideas.

Coming from big business, he also knows how to navigate corporate culture and best position a startup to allay concerns and make a strong use case for iDvera’s technology. That’s all the more important in Nebraska’s tech-skeptical environment.

“You can have the best thing on earth, but still, people will resist it, fight it,” Kaniewski said. “I saw that through a big organization, my own people. I saw it also through the customer’s lens, where you can have a brand new product (and) launches don’t typically just go the way you expect.”

Perhaps one of the biggest lessons from Valmont: It’s important to ask for advice and have strong relationships in the business community to learn from. Omaha, Kaniewski said, is a great place for that.

“Omaha has allowed me to quickly find someone who knew government sales for the military,” he said. “Getting those initial conversations when you’re a startup can be difficult, but as soon as you meet with somebody, well, they know five other people that would be interested in (your technology) and understand your use case … It’s not just because I was associated with Valmont but also because that’s how the community operates.”

For the moment, iDvera is privately funded, but as it considers how and when to take on outside investment, Omaha is a prime market to find capital, Kaniewski said. The startup is also taking advantage of other local benefits, like working with the Nebraska Defense Research Corporation to get security clearances and connect with potential government customers.

For Kaniewski, growing iDvera in Nebraska will result in a stronger company. Having to really prove the technology means building a stronger product and more devoted customers — a hallmark of the region.

“There’s so many different things that Nebraska is accepting of that were revolutionary when they came out,” Kaniewski said. “That history of both, ‘Hey, I’m going to challenge (new technology), because it better work really well. Once it does, then I’m all on board.’ I think that’s one of the things I see that is very different than, let’s say, Silicon Valley or New York.”

Lev Gringauz is a Report for America corps member who writes about corporate innovation and workforce development for Silicon Prairie News.