Scene Sharp Technologies Inc., a Fredericton software company that improves the quality of colour digital photography, is ramping up its sales effort through a series of deals with international distributors.

Scene Sharp is the company set up to commercialize the research of Yun Zhang, the Canada Research Chair in advanced geomatics image processing at the University of New Brunswick. Zhang has created software that greatly enhances the precision of digital photography, so it improves the colour of satellite photos, the resolution of high-speed shots and a camera’s sensitivity to light.

Two years ago, it hired as CEO Ian Lucas, a veteran of Ocean Nutrition Canada, the Dartmouth food additive maker that sold out to Royal DSM of the Netherlands for $540 million in 2012. In the last six months, Lucas has shifted the company away from a direct-sales model to a distributor- and channel-based model. And the new strategy is starting to pay off.

“We had to reinvent our business model,” said Lucas in an interview last week. “Through the distributors we now have access to end-users for our image processing software products, and that’s created a large pool of early adopter customers. The goal is to sign 20 distribution contracts this year and this means we’ll get sales coming in.”

Lucas was speaking just days after signing the first of these contracts with a major distributor in the U.S. The distributor is already connecting Scene Sharp to customers in major market channels such as defence and intelligence, oil and gas, marine, emergency response and agriculture.

The company is now focused on software that can enhance the colour of images taken from satellites, which means they are far more effective in detecting, say, changes in a crop in agricultural analysis.

Lucas added that the great thing about these connections is that they lead to early adopters of the product. Whether or not these are initially paying customers, they provide feedback on Scene Sharp’s product to help it improve the functionality and find the most attractive niches.

“It’s all about understanding whether your product is minimally viable to the extent that people will pay for it,” he said.

Scene Sharp now has about 100 potential customers in its funnel — a trade term for potential customers it is now talking to — and aims to have 20 distribution agreements signed by the end of the year.

The company, which now has nine employees, is close to closing a round of funding, though Lucas declined to say how much it had raised. He said the company will begin working on a more substantial funding round late in the year, once it has a more established revenue stream to show investors.

Scene Sharp first gained public recognition when it won $145,000 in cash and in-kind services at the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru competition in the spring of 2011. Scene Sharp’s prize included a $100,000 investment from NBIF, and a private investor also came in with a $50,000 equity investment. The company raised about $300,000 from angel investors in October 2012.