This Startup Lets Farmers Capture Data Just by Talking

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-08

Picture this: you've spent eight hours in the field under the sun, checking crops, spotting disease, noting irrigation issues. Then you head back to the office, sit down at a computer, and spend another two hours typing all of that into a clunky software system. That's the daily reality for most farmers and agronomists, and it's exactly the problem Tellia is trying to solve. Tellia, a Paris-based voice AI assistant for agriculture founded in 2024, has just raised $5 million in a pre-Seed round to scale its technology that lets farmers, agronomists, and field teams capture and use their data simply by speaking. No typing required. No learning complicated software. Just talk, and the system handles the rest. The pre-Seed round was led by Revent, with participation from Grey Silo Ventures (the CVC of Cereal Docks Group), Jeriko (operated by Techmind), and Fund F. This kind of investor backing shows real confidence in the voice-first approach to agricultural data. ## The Real Problem Isn't Data, It's the Interface Coline Labadie de Faÿ, CEO and co-founder of Tellia, puts it bluntly: "The Ag industry keeps facing the same challenge: the people who spend their days in the field spend their evenings at a keyboard. That was never a data problem. It was an interface problem. Traditional software cannot accept it the way it actually comes out, spoken, in the field, in whatever language the team works in." That's a powerful insight. Farmers aren't short on data, they're drowning in it. The problem is getting that data out of their heads and into a system without creating more work. Tellia's approach is refreshingly simple: don't force people to adapt to software, make software adapt to how people actually work. "So we did not build another platform that wants to own all the data," de Faÿ explains. "Instead, we built the interface. You talk, Tellia captures it, structures it, and interprets it into something the whole operation can act on. This funding round lets us push the voice AI further, build the agentic layer that sits between the field and the rest of the AgTech stack, and grow our team in the US and Europe." ## A Wave of Investment in European AgTech Tellia's raise comes amid continued investment in AI and technology-enabled agriculture across Europe in 2026. And this isn't an isolated trend. Several other startups are pulling in significant funding to tackle different parts of the agricultural challenge: - Belgium's Rainbow Crops raised $11.3 million to advance its AI-supported crop gene-editing platform - London-based Biographica secured $9.3 million to develop its AI platform for climate-resilient crop varieties - France's UBEES raised $9.3 million to expand its technology-enabled regenerative agriculture operations and connected-hive monitoring capabilities Together, these rounds represent roughly $49.1 million in disclosed funding for European AgTech innovation. That's a significant vote of confidence in the sector, and it signals that investors see real potential in applying AI to agriculture. ## Built Around How Farms Actually Work Here's what makes Tellia different from the dozens of other AgTech platforms out there: it doesn't force farms into a one-size-fits-all template. Because no two operations work the same way, Tellia shapes its structure around how each farm actually runs. A vineyard in California operates completely differently from a grain farm in Iowa, and Tellia respects that. The result is an agricultural agent that's easier to use than traditional software, more complete, and genuinely more valuable in the field. Instead of fighting the tool, teams can focus on what they do best, knowing that their observations and insights are being captured and organized automatically. ## What's Next for Tellia With this fresh funding, Tellia says it will accelerate the rollout of its agentic AI suite. The company is taking a partner-first approach: partners embed Tellia through a simple API, and their users just talk. Tellia captures, structures, and interprets the field data, delivering records and recommendations directly inside the partner's own product. For partners, that means richer data and higher daily usage without building complex voice recognition systems from scratch. For farmers, it means a tool that actually fits into their workflow instead of adding another layer of administrative burden. It's still early days for Tellia, but the vision is clear: make agricultural data capture as natural as having a conversation. If they can pull that off, they might just change how the entire industry works.