SaeFarm Secures Pre-Series A Funding from Space-Tech Investor to Scale Satellite AI Farm Solutions

SaeFarm, a Korean startup combining satellite imagery and AI to deliver precision agriculture solutions, announced on Wednesday that it has raised pre-Series A funding from space and deep-tech specialist investor Nova Ventures.

The investment amount was not disclosed.

Founded in June 2022, SaeFarm analyzes satellite images with AI to diagnose crop health at the field level and provides tailored cultivation guidance. The company has secured data feeds from twelve global satellite operators—covering high-resolution, hyperspectral, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery—and has built up a database of more than 500 million satellite observations across 35 crop types over five years, steadily improving its yield-prediction accuracy. Applied to approximately 8,000 farms in Korea and 200,000 hectares worldwide, the platform has demonstrated an 18 percent increase in harvest volume and a 95 percent detection rate for pests and abnormal growth patterns.

A flagship example is the satellite-AI decision-support system co-developed with the Gyeonggi Agricultural Research and Extension Services and Yeoncheon County. The system uses 0.7-meter-resolution imagery and AI analytics to measure growth status daily and deliver instant alerts on anomalies. Built on data from 168 rice and 52 soybean farms in Yeoncheon, the solution earned a CES 2026 Innovation Award last November.

SaeFarm’s technology is now deployed across regional agricultural cooperatives’ contract rice farms, Pulmuone’s contract soybean growers, and local governments managing crops such as garlic in Uiseong and beans in Goesan. Notably, Pulmuone’s contract farms span Korea’s main production zones—from Yeoncheon to Jeju—as well as overseas farms in Russia, Canada, and the United States. The ability to monitor growth via satellite alone, without site visits or on-ground sensors, has proved decisive for managing remote farmland. Internationally, SaeFarm has exported a service covering approximately 25,000 hectares in Indonesia and is conducting a 90-hectare technical pilot in Uzbekistan under a memorandum of understanding with that country’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.

“I believe the space economy is about solving Earth’s problems with space technology,” said Park Ji-young, CEO of Nova Ventures. “Climate change and the shrinking farmer population make it harder to pass cultivation know-how to the next generation. Meeting SaeFarm, which delivers farming solutions through satellite data and AI, made me realize the space economy is already part of daily life.”

“The sharp rise in heat-related farmer deaths means we need a new agricultural paradigm more urgently than ever,” said Jeong Seung-hwan, CEO of SaeFarm. “We will build nationwide cultivation protocols based on satellite AI data, so farms can operate automatically without farmers having to go out into the fields.”

Nova Ventures has focused on nurturing Korean space-technology through funds such as the Nova K-SPACE investment partnership. The firm sees the low Earth orbit satellite era driving down subscription costs for satellite data, which will expand demand for satellite-based AI agriculture analytics.

In Korea’s agtech sector, physical-AI agriculture platform N.Thing recently secured strategic investment from Samsung Venture Investment, rapidly emerging as a leading physical-AI player with deployments across national research institutes, bio and food-service conglomerates, and educational facilities. Eco-material specialist PLANTNER also raised pre-Series A funding to push forward domestic production and commercialization of marine-biomaterial alginate.