BY ANGELA K. ROBERTS | PHOTOS BY CHRISTINE PETKOV
For Nate Smith, CEO of North Star Systems in Lafayette, the path to entrepreneurship wasn’t paved in a classroom, but on the runways of Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California, and a technology hub in the southeastern Netherlands.
A veteran of the U.S. Air Force, Smith is now applying the adapt-and-overcome mindset of a staff sergeant as founder of this new veteran-owned technology company.
A foundation of global experience
Smith’s journey began three days after his graduation from Frontier High School in 2000, when he left Greater Lafayette for active duty. Serving as a KC-10 aircraft systems mechanic and instructor, he deployed to locations including Iraq and Diego Garcia, an atoll in the British Indian Ocean territory.
After leaving the service in 2008, Smith eventually made his way to the Netherlands. For five years, he worked as a civilian field service representative for the Royal Netherlands Air Force, living in the Brainport region. Located in the southern part of the country, the Brainport is an innovation ecosystem centered on the industrial city of Eindhoven and comprised of more than 5,000 technology companies
“I’ve had my hands in a lot of neat technology,” Smith says, reflecting on a career that has taken him to 50 countries around the world.
Solving problems at scale
Smith eventually landed back in Lafayette, where he met his wife, Jen Walters, when he sold her a Prius at Bob Rohrman Toyota. He took a technician job with General Electric Aviation, and he and Jen started a family. The couple has two girls, Harper, 7, and Amelia, 6.
In 2023, Smith launched North Star Systems. The company provides real-time monitoring and control services for large-scale systems in agriculture, IT, municipalities
and the oil and gas industries, helping customers lower costs and mitigate risk. Products include remote tank monitors that reduce the need for manual on-site inspections. Customers receive automated text or email alerts directly to their phones with real-time information, allowing them to respond quickly to potential leaks, overflows or sudden drops in tank levels.
Smith is an authorized dealer of the technology.
“I am actually a third-party service provider. I buy the product, and then I sell it OEM-style,” Smith says. He likens it to iPhones, explaining, “Apple makes the cell phone, and Verizon sells it.”
The business is growing rapidly, now servicing clients in Indiana, Arkansas and Fresno, California.
While corn and soybeans reign supreme in Indiana, Arkansas leads in rice, soybeans and cotton, and Fresno is known for producing grapes, pistachios and almonds. The technology is nimble enough for various applications across agriculture and other industries.
Indiana’s ecosystems
Smith is deeply rooted in Indiana’s entrepreneurial, technological and agricultural ecosystems.
He sits on the advisory board for TechPoint, an industry-led initiative promoting digital innovation in Indiana. In 2025, Smith was a finalist for the organization’s Mira Awards Rising Entrepreneur of the Year.
He also participates in AgriNovus, an industry-academia coalition helping to accelerate Indiana’s agbioscience economy. The organization supports small ag-focused startups like North Star.
Smith also is involved in the Indianapolis community of Praxis, a Christian venture-building ecosystem.
Locally, Smith graduated from a recent cohort of MatchBox Coworking Studio, which has served as a launchpad for his business. He now helps to mentor owners of new startups.
The veteran’s edge
Currently, Smith maintains a lean operation, but he has plans to expand. Ultimately, he’d like to scale up to about 24 employees, with help from the EDGE credit system (Economic Development for a Growing Economy) from the Indiana Economic Development Corp.
Smith wants to engage with programs such as InVets to hire veterans and Second Chance to provide opportunities for formerly incarcerated individuals.
Reflecting on the unique perspective veterans bring to business, Smith notes that the stressors service members face can be very different from the corporate world, but the competencies they build often map directly onto organizational needs.
For example, research shows that many veterans excel at skills such as mission-to-task decomposition, a military planning process that breaks down a high-level, complex objective into smaller, actionable and measurable tasks Such skills are seen as a practical application of grit, the perseverance and passion for long-term goals.
“We’re ready to commit to the process, and we’ll adjust as we go,” he says of veterans. “Adapt-overcome is a model of operating.”
Today, Smith lives a quiet life in the Otterbein area with his family, balanced against the high-energy demands of a growing tech company.
He says that running North Star Systems is one of the hardest things he’s ever done. But for this veteran-turned-entrepreneur, he’s tackling every challenge one step at a time.
