Numanac Co-founder, Daniel Lee, did not want to be an agtech founder who launched a product without ever speaking to a farmer. Instead, Lee and his team spent countless days crisscrossing the U.S. — meeting hundreds of farmers — to ensure that Numanac can help them manage their data legacy for generations to come.
Numanac is an AI-based application that allows growers to create a farming database through an easy-to-use interface, Lee explained. Farmers can either use the app’s audio recording feature to note what’s happening in a field in real-time as they are scouting the land, or they can import images, spreadsheets, and other records into the system, he added.
Along with co-founders Dan Kelly, Branden Kang, Kaleb Barker, Lee started Numanac to help farmers manage their data more effectively, at a time when lenders, insurers, government agencies, and other third-parties are asking for more information from producers. Numanac streamlines data collection, without asking the farmers to do more than record what they see in the field or upload a file, Lee noted.
“If you think of a farmer’s life, they are earning a negative median income. ... They are effectively spending up to 520 hours a year on data collection. And when you put all that together, the prospect of being able to afford expensive machinery, expensive subscriptions on software that actually forces farmers to become data clerks is not really a feasible way for them to collect data,” Lee said.
Numanac’s product roadmap: APIs, integrating video feeds
Looking ahead, Numanac is working on new features as part of a product roadmap, including APIs for software integrations and exploring how to use drones and virtual and augmented reality glasses to collect data, Lee explained.
“Our platform really is working with descriptions. So, when a farmer describes their operations [or] when a farmer provides files that describe their operations — whether it is a spreadsheet, a PDF, or Word document — we are able to extract that data. We are able to structure that data, and then we are able to have that data be referenced,” Lee elaborated.
He added, “Visual data does not have to be an exception, meaning that as LLMs’ capabilities [improve], and they are able to better describe images, so can Numanac’s capacity to further augment data collection for farmers.”
Numanac partnered with UC Davis on a pilot programme and various farmers across 16 states through two beta releases, before ultimately releasing the current version. Through the app testing phase, the digital farming start-up accumulated a waitlist of growers, accounting for 225,000 acres of farmland, as Lee shared on LinkedIn.
With a public app now available, Numanac is turning its attention to growing in the U.S. and beyond, with talks underway with farmers from Brazil, Ghana, and the UK, Lee said. The start-up has already received funding from Ponderosa Ventures to support scaling the solution, he added.
“We found a great partner in Ponderosa Ventures. We are very much aligned with their investment philosophy, the mission that they have regarding the food system, climate, etc., and so it was a no brainer to go with them and moving forward. Right now, our objective is to hit the market, iterate, and deliver the promised features as quickly as possible, and to generate meaningful revenue with which to raise the seed round,” Lee emphasised.
Additionally, Numanac will be attending the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in San Francisco to share its platform with investors and farmers, Lee noted.
