Submitted
2025 Global Economic Prosperity Challenge

Farmer Digitization Platform

Team Leader
Chan Yong Lee
Numanac is a multi-agent AI system transforming casual conversation into structured agricultural data. Our platform enables farmers to log operations through natural conversation - as simple as sending a voice message or text. Farmers can say "sprayed the back 40 with fungicide yesterday" and our system automatically converts this into properly formatted data entries. At our core are multi-agent systems...
What is the name of your organization?
Numanac
What is the name of your solution?
Farmer Digitization Platform
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
AI powered farmer digitization platform transforming voice logs into structured data, unlocking the untapped value of 600M+ small farmers.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, USA (Delaware Corporation)
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
USA
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Numanac solves the critical data bottleneck in agriculture by addressing the widespread lack of digitization among 600M+ smallholder farmers globally. Despite AI rapidly commoditizing analytics capabilities, agricultural innovation remains stunted by the absence of high-quality, structured operational data from the majority of farms worldwide. Three fundamental barriers prevent smallholder digitization: cost prohibition (existing digitization solutions require exorbitant costs infeasible for farmers), administrative burden (manual data entry consumes valuable time necessary for off-farm income), and technical illiteracy (complex interfaces create adoption barriers). This digitization gap creates cascading problems throughout the agricultural ecosystem: agribusinesses compensate for poor visibility by overbooking acreage, lenders and insurers charge substantial risk premiums, government agencies struggle to target support programs effectively, and food processors lack supply chain transparency. Without solving this upstream challenge of data acquisition from historically inaccessible farmers, agricultural stakeholders remain limited to recycling through the tiny minority of digitized operations, effectively preventing AI from transforming agriculture while perpetuating farmers' economic vulnerability. By removing these barriers to farmer digitization, Numanac unlocks the foundation of the agricultural data economy, creating a true moat in an AI era where quality data increasingly differentiates winners from losers.
What is your solution?
Numanac is a multi-agent AI system transforming casual conversation into structured agricultural data. Our platform enables farmers to log operations through natural conversation - as simple as sending a voice message or text. Farmers can say "sprayed the back 40 with fungicide yesterday" and our system automatically converts this into properly formatted data entries. At our core are multi-agent systems grounded by proprietary agricultural ontologies that extract, categorize, and structure information without requiring farmers to learn complex interfaces. Our AI is guardrailed by structured farming contexts, recognizing entities like fields, crops, activities, and equipment to create standardized records from unstructured speech. For agricultural stakeholders, we provide customizable data extraction frameworks tailored to specific needs. A lender might deploy an ontology focused on harvest records, while a processor prioritizes field scout reports - all from the same farmer conversations. This unlocks a twofold value proposition: farmers receive free recordkeeping software for data management and operational context communication, while stakeholders gain unprecedented visibility that reduces risk premiums and enhances their ability to service smallholders. By eliminating traditional adoption barriers, Numanac solves the fundamental data acquisition challenge in agricultural technology, positioning us to own a critical data pipeline.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Numanac serves two primary populations: smallholder farmers (our users) and agricultural stakeholders (our customers). Our solution directly impacts the lives of 600M+ smallholder farmers globally who remain digitally excluded. In the U.S. alone, 1.8 million smallholders operate at a loss despite subsidies. These farmers—often resource-constrained, time-starved, and whose farm hands oft-face literacy challenges—have been systematically left behind by traditional agtech solutions that demand expensive subscriptions, technical expertise, or significant time investments. By providing a free, intuitive conversational interface that requires minimal technical knowledge, Numanac empowers these farmers to digitize their operations without financial burden. This enables them to maintain better records, access personalized recommendations, qualify for lower-cost financing, reduce insurance premiums, and communicate operational context more effectively with buyers and processors. For agricultural stakeholders, Numanac transforms their ability to serve smallholders by providing unprecedented operational visibility through tailored data extraction. This reduces risk premiums, enables precision targeting of services, streamlines underwriting processes, and creates opportunities to expand into previously inaccessible markets. By bridging this digital divide, Numanac creates economic opportunities for smallholders while unlocking market expansion for agricultural institutions.
Solution Team:
Chan Yong Lee
Chan Yong Lee
Cofounder, CEO