Agriculture has no shortage of data. Its problem is getting that data out of the field. Crop scouts spot disease. Agronomists make recommendations. Farm managers record irrigation decisions. Field crews report what they see while moving from one block to another. But much of that information never makes it into the digital systems used to manage farms because capturing it often means stopping work, opening a screen and filling out forms.
Tellia wants to remove that friction. The Paris- and San Francisco-based agtech startup has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding to expand a voice AI platform that allows farmers, agronomists and field teams to capture operational information through phone calls, voice notes, text messages, WhatsApp and email.
The round was led by European venture capital firm Revent, with participation from Grey Silo Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Cereal Docks Group, Jeriko, operated by Techmind, and Fund F.
The bet is straightforward: if farm workers can talk to agricultural software instead of having to type into it, more of what happens in the field could become usable data. Tellia’s system converts spoken and written updates into structured records associated with specific fields, crops, crews and operations. It can then use those records to answer operational and agronomic questions.
That makes the company’s proposition less about building another farm-management application and more about creating a new interface for the software farms already use.
Agriculture’s data problem is often a workflow problem
Agricultural businesses generate an enormous volume of information every day. The challenge is that much of it is generated by people who spend their working hours outdoors rather than behind a computer.
A field worker may notice a disease outbreak, describe crop conditions, report a completed spray operation or flag an irrigation problem. In conventional systems, that observation still needs to be manually entered before it can become part of the farm’s digital record.
Tellia is attempting to eliminate that intermediate step.
A worker can describe an observation in natural language, while the company’s AI interprets the interaction and converts it into structured information. Instead of asking field teams to learn another specialised interface, Tellia works through communication channels they already use.
The company says the platform can also handle multiple languages and mixed-language conversations, an important consideration for agricultural operations with multilingual workforces.
The broader shift is significant. Agricultural technology is moving from software that simply stores information towards AI systems that can interpret farm-specific data and interact with users in more natural ways.
The question for startups such as Tellia is whether that technology can solve a practical problem well enough to change behaviour in the field.
Early adoption offers a glimpse of the opportunity
Tellia launched initially in the US and says it has recorded 80 per cent daily active usage among field teams within two months of onboarding.
Its deployments include almond producer Campos Brothers Farms and Duckhorn wineries, according to the company.
The startup is now looking to extend that model into Europe, where its customers include the Institut Français de la Vigne et du Vin, the Val de Gascogne cooperative and German plant breeder KWS Saat.
Tellia was founded in 2024 by Coline Labadie de Faÿ and Vincent Trastour, who met through Entrepreneur First and subsequently built the company between Paris and San Francisco. The early customer traction points to a potentially important distinction in agricultural AI: adoption may depend less on how sophisticated the technology is than on how little it asks users to change their behaviour.
For a worker already carrying a phone, talking may be easier than opening an application, navigating a form and entering multiple fields of information.
From voice assistant to AI infrastructure
Tellia’s ambition extends beyond voice-enabled note-taking. The new funding will support development of what the company describes as an agentic AI suite designed to sit between agricultural workers and existing agtech systems.
That could make the company a technology layer rather than a destination application. Through an API, agricultural software providers can integrate Tellia’s technology without replacing their existing platforms. A field worker could communicate through voice or another familiar channel; Tellia would then capture, structure and interpret the information before passing it into the relevant software system.
For agtech companies, that offers a potentially easier route to improving field-data capture without redesigning their entire user interface. Tellia says its first agritech partners are already integrating the technology. “The Ag industry keeps facing the same challenge: the people who spend their days in the field spend their evenings at a keyboard,” said Labadie de Faÿ, Tellia’s CEO and co-founder. The problem, she argued, is not necessarily a shortage of agricultural data, but the difficulty of capturing it through software designed largely around office workflows.
That distinction could prove important. If AI becomes the interface rather than the application itself, the competitive landscape in farm software could shift from who owns the dashboard to who can capture and interpret the most useful data.
Data privacy becomes part of the pitch
Tellia’s US-Europe operating model also brings data governance into the company’s proposition. The startup says it combines US commercial development with European approaches to data protection, security and confidentiality. Its website states that farm observations, reports and field records are not shared with third parties.
That will matter as agricultural businesses become increasingly dependent on digital records containing commercially sensitive information—from crop performance and field conditions to input applications and operational decisions. The more deeply AI systems are embedded in farm workflows, the more important questions around data ownership, security and access become.
The bigger AI race in agriculture
Tellia’s funding arrives as investors continue to place bets on AI applications across the agricultural value chain, from crop development and lending to farm management and field operations. But the company’s immediate problem is deliberately narrower: how to capture the information that already exists in farmers’ heads, phones and field conversations.
Its 13-person team plans to expand across the US and Europe as it develops the platform and grows its customer base. The larger opportunity is potentially much bigger than a voice assistant. If Tellia can persuade field workers to routinely communicate with software in the same way they communicate with colleagues, the company could become an interface between agricultural workers and the increasingly complex digital infrastructure behind modern farming.The real test, however, will not be whether AI can understand a farmer.
