Tellia raises $5 million to bring voice AI to farm fields

San Francisco- and Paris-based agtech startup Tellia has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding to expand its voice AI platform, which allows farmers, agronomists and field teams to capture operational data 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 company is targeting a persistent problem in agricultural technology: much of the information generated in the field never reaches farm management software because entering it requires screens, forms and manual data entry. Tellia’s system converts spoken or written updates into structured records linked to specific fields, crops, crews and operations. The platform can also use those records to answer operational and agronomic questions. Tellia says its approach is designed around how individual farms operate, rather than forcing teams into standardized software workflows.

Turning field conversations into data

Agricultural businesses generate large amounts of operational information every day, including crop scouting observations, disease sightings, spray decisions, crew updates and other field notes. Yet workers who spend most of their time outdoors may have little opportunity or incentive to enter that information into conventional software.

Tellia is positioning voice as an alternative interface. A field worker can describe an observation or task in natural language, while the company’s AI processes the conversation and converts it into structured information. Users can interact with the system through channels that are already part of their daily routines rather than learning another specialized application.

The company also says its system can work across languages, an important consideration for agricultural operations that employ multilingual field teams. Tellia’s website says users can communicate in different languages, including mixed-language conversations, while the platform organizes the resulting information into farm-specific records.

The approach reflects a broader shift in agricultural technology toward AI systems that can interact directly with operational data. John Deere, for example, recently introduced an AI assistant that uses farm, field and machine data to provide farmers with operational insights.

Tellia reports 80% daily usage among U.S. field teams

Tellia launched initially in the U.S. and says it has achieved 80% 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 seeking to replicate that adoption in Europe. Its European deployments include the Institut Français de la Vigne et du Vin, the Val de Gascogne cooperative and German plant breeder KWS Saat. The company was founded in 2024 by Coline Labadie de Faÿ and Vincent Trastour, who met through Entrepreneur First before developing the business between Paris and San Francisco.

Tellia’s transatlantic operating model is also intended to address concerns around agricultural data. The company says it combines U.S. 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.

From voice assistant to agricultural AI layer

The new funding will also support development of Tellia’s agentic AI suite, which the company wants to position as an interface between field workers and existing agtech systems.

Rather than requiring agricultural software providers to replace their existing products, Tellia plans to allow them to integrate its technology via an API. Users would communicate with the Tellia layer by voice or other familiar channels, while the system would capture, structure and interpret the information before returning records or recommendations to the partner’s software.

The strategy could allow existing agricultural platforms to increase the amount of field data captured without redesigning their user interfaces. 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,” Labadie de Faÿ, Tellia’s CEO and co-founder, said in the funding announcement. She argued that the problem is less about the availability of agricultural data than the difficulty of capturing it through software designed primarily for office environments.

Revent General Partner Otto Birnbaum said the investor believes a voice-first approach could help agriculture move toward what he described as an “agentic data age,” with Tellia providing a data layer intended to improve operational efficiency and productivity.

Investors see a broader role for AI in agriculture

The funding comes as investors continue to back AI applications aimed at addressing operational problems across the agricultural value chain. Recent deals have included AI-driven crop development, agricultural lending and farm-management technologies, reflecting growing interest in software that can work directly with complex agricultural data.

For Tellia, the immediate focus is narrower: making it easier for information generated in the field to be entered into digital systems. The company says its 13-person team will expand in the U.S. and Europe as it develops the technology and grows its customer base.

If the model scales, Tellia’s role could extend beyond a standalone farm assistant. The company’s longer-term ambition is to become a voice interface connecting agricultural workers with the wider software infrastructure used to manage farms, crops and field operations.