When Guilherme Tejada joined a Brazilian fertilizer company in 2016, a career in agriculture wasn’t the plan. As a marketing graduate, Tejada expected to analyze trends in market intelligence. Instead, the role he found himself in placed him in direct contact with farmers.
“I got into agriculture almost by accident,” Tejada said. “But once I understood their businesses, I realized how innovative the industry really is.”
Over the decade that followed, Tejada interviewed growers across multiple sectors and ultimately earned an Agribusiness MBA to deepen his understanding of crop production and machinery. He found that while the world of agriculture had already embraced GPS and drones, crop scouting analytics remained outdated.
That observation became the foundation for Solvata, a startup Tejada officially co-founded alongside now-CTO Jeff Hampson in Raleigh earlier this year.
Solving a daily pain point through voice
Crop scouting is a vital routine whereby agronomists walk fields looking for pests or diseases. The observations they make through the process inform management decisions, which in turn affect millions of dollars’ worth of business. However, the process of documenting the findings from crop scouting efforts remains manual—which is to say, less efficient than it could be.
“Many professionals still carry clipboards,” Tejada said. “They write notes while walking and later manually transfer them into software, effectively doing the work twice.”
With Solvata, Tejada aims to eliminate this friction with a voice-first approach. In lieu of the two-part approach of writing notes to transcribe later on, users are able to conduct crop scouting by speaking naturally as they walk through a field.
The platform uses AI— including OpenAI’s Whisper and models like Claude and GPT—to not only transcribe users’ voice observations, but transform them into structured reports and actionable recommendations.
This workflow enables documentation in real time, rather than standard, delayed practice of wrapping up paperwork after the fact in a pickup truck.
“Technology should adapt to how people work,” Tejada noted, speaking to the idea that his platform is essentially bringing streamlined reporting to the workers’ existing process.
By saving time in the documentation process, Solvata ultimately helps agriculture professionals do more to execute, scale and improve.
Building Solvata from RTP
In August 2025, Tejada moved from Brazil to Raleigh, believing the Research Triangle Park offered better opportunities for an early-stage startup.
“The ecosystem here makes a big difference,” he said.
Organizations like the Research Triangle Park Foundation and First Flight Venture Center provided mentorship in fundraising and customer development, both of which Tejada conveyed were instrumental for an international founder.
Tejada believes AI’s value lies in solving practical problems, and there are still plenty to be found in agriculture. The industry generates enormous amounts of information; the challenge is capturing it efficiently.
Solvata removes repetitive administrative work, allowing agronomists to focus on collection and analysis rather than the in-between step of data entry.
“Our goal isn’t to replace the agronomist, but to help them use their expertise,” Tejada said.
To that end, the Solvata team has developed numerous ways to apply voice observations to more efficient farming. The platform’s AI effectively takes field notes and uses them to produce prioritized task recommendations; team task management; adn GPS-tagged insights relating to the fields in question.
Solvata is also being built for easy deployment across a variety of ecosystems and is designed with multilingual support.
QUICK BITS
Startup: Solvata
Co-Founders: Guilherme Tejada, Jeff Hampson
Founded: 2026
Team size: 2
Location: Raleigh
Website: solvata.farm
Funding: Bootstrapped
While the startup was officially founded earlier this year, Solvata began with years of listening to agriculture professionals. Tejada prioritized this foundational research over, say, pitching or fundraising. Hundreds of interviews revealed universal frustrations regardless of operation size, and this helped shape a product strategy focused on making existing processes faster.
As Solvata continues to develop, it aims to give crop consultants more of their most valuable resource: time. By helping the people feeding the world spend less time with clipboards, Tejada is building a solution that keeps them where they create the most value—in the field.
