Michael Gilbert built a company that helped farmers understand what was happening in their orchards. His latest startup grew out of a struggle to understand what was happening in his own body.
The Semios founder is now building BaroShift, a Vancouver-based startup whose forearm wearable guides personalized breathing sessions designed to train the body’s stress-recovery response.
Gilbert holds a PhD in organic chemistry and spent two decades in pharmaceutical drug discovery, including hypertension and atrial fibrillation programs. He says a serious back injury roughly 18 months ago prompted the venture. While the injury healed, he continued to experience what he describes as nervous-system dysregulation.
“I spent two decades in drug discovery. When my own nervous system stayed dysregulated after the injury healed, I realized the missing piece was something you train, not something you take.”
For Techcouver readers, Gilbert is a familiar name. He founded Vancouver-based Semios in 2010, building an agtech business that combined sensors, data and pest-management tools to help growers manage permanent crops. According to Gilbert, Semios reached a $1 billion valuation, joining Canada’s ranks of unicorn startups and becoming one of the largest companies in agtech.
As Techcouver previously reported, Gilbert announced his departure as CEO in December 2022 after leading the company for 13 years. By then, Semios had raised more than $225 million in external capital.
With BaroShift, his focus has shifted from agricultural systems to human physiology. Most of the team is based in Vancouver, while Gilbert also works from the Sunshine Coast.
The armband reads beat-to-beat pulse intervals. Its companion app calibrates a breathing pace to each person’s baroreflex interval, then guides and adjusts that pace throughout an eight-minute daily session.
The approach centres on the baroreflex, a feedback loop involved in regulating heart rate and blood pressure. BaroShift aims to train that loop through personalized breathing. The device itself does not measure or monitor blood pressure.
Gilbert sees an opportunity to give consumers a daily practice alongside feedback on how they respond. BaroShift provides scores reflecting training performance and the body’s response during sessions.
“Most of the category tells you how stressed you were or how badly you slept. We built the other half: a daily eight minute routine, paced to the individual, with a score for how the training is going.”
The venture brings Gilbert’s experience in biology, sensors and commercializing technology to a different market, with a product inspired by his own recovery.
BaroShift is currently available as a general wellness product. According to Gilbert, several university studies are underway to support broader claims, and the company is discussing pilot clinical studies involving people with compromised nervous-system or cardiovascular function.
Those efforts represent the next stage for the Vancouver startup: building evidence around a product that began with its founder’s search for answers.
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