Léo Carvalho, Chief Global Strategy Officer, Solinftec

Solinftec is a technology company built around one idea: making farmers more efficient. That rests on two pillars — giving farmers back money and time, which makes them more profitable, and caring for sustainability. Throughout our journey, we’ve used technologies such as AI and blockchain to build hardware and software that fit into a farmer’s daily routine without interrupting it.

Several of our founders came from the sugarcane industry, so that’s where we started; we believed the knowledge they had gained there was significant.

That foundation gave us the support to expand. We now serve sugarcane, row crops such as corn, soybeans and cotton, and perennials. We’re based in Araçatuba, São Paulo, and have expanded across the Americas. But what has really driven our growth is building solutions that make farming more efficient and more sustainable.

Two ideas come together here. The first is “living the field”: the belief that you have to be in the field yourself to gather the information that tells you what’s really going on. The second is what I call “freedom per acre,” giving farmers more autonomy.

“Living the field” is how we believe agricultural technology should work: present where decisions matter, observing real conditions, and turning what it sees directly into action in real time. The cycle is observe, decide, act, and learn, and we call that closed cycle “physical AI.” Unlike software that merely analyzes information on a dashboard, physical AI becomes an active, permanent part of the farm’s infrastructure. Much of today’s agricultural technology gathers information but takes a long time to act on it. The value lies in making the cycle work reliably, because timing, context, and weather matter enormously in agriculture, and the only way to really grasp them is to stay in the field.

When you’re in the middle of a problem, you can usually solve it faster than someone watching from the outside. Living the field means seeing and understanding what happens as it happens: from the moment plants emerge, through gathering the data, to applying the right treatment at the right time and following the results.

Ultimately, that’s what gives farmers freedom. Right now, they can’t keep juggling two separate worlds: machines on one side, inputs and seeds on the other. Solinftec’s proposal is to sit between the two, reducing farmers’ dependence on machines and their use of herbicides and other chemicals. With labor shortages, chemical reduction mandates, and yield demands all growing, agriculture needs to move away from reactive machine interventions and toward physical AI that functions as permanent farm infrastructure. That’s where our robot, Solix, comes in. It lives in that space between the two and gives farmers more freedom: they no longer need to be in the field all the time, because the technology does that job for them. And Solix’s commercial availability has just expanded.

Take a sprayer. You can’t make a good treatment decision if it covers the field just once, twice, or three times. Yet the industry still operates reactively: most agronomic decisions are made only after a problem becomes visible or a machine makes a periodic pass through the field. It’s like cleaning a large house: walk through each room once and you don’t really know how dirty it is. Unless you stay, watching and analyzing, you end up acting on someone else’s recommendation rather than on what’s actually happening.

We propose being in the field constantly, tracking weeds and acting on them in real time. Solix lives there. It is solar-powered and completely autonomous, designed to remain in the field rather than return to a shed each night. It reads the crop plant by plant and treats weeds individually in a single pass, with no onboard operator or remote steering. Because conditions shift daily, Solix provides continuous observation and real-time intervention. It cares for the field instead of passing through, solving one problem, and never coming back. A field changes from one day to the next. If you apply a chemical treatment and wait two or three days, rain may fall, the sun comes back out, and a new set of plants germinates. When you’re there all the time, you can apply a treatment, see the results, and follow up.

Today, farmers live in two separate worlds: machines and chemicals. A farmer may be able to afford a new machine but not be able to fix it themselves. Change certain parts and the warranty is gone, because the system built around dealerships and OEMs is completely closed. That model often ties farmers to high dealer markups for parts and repairs, and it takes away their freedom. It’s their machine, yet they can’t change it the way they want. The system was designed to keep them locked in.

What we propose is completely different. We give farmers hardware and software they can use however they want, without creating that kind of dependence on us. It’s equipment they can leave in the field to solve the problem without having to be there. That’s technology working for the farmer, not the farmer working for the technology. It gives them the freedom to choose which products they use, which fields they work, and how they spend their time, including more time with their families and more control over their own routine.

Freedom per acre delivers three shifts. Freedom of time: autonomous systems absorb the work that previously demanded human supervision, returning those hours directly to the farmer. Freedom of choice: we counter the dealer model by providing smart glasses with digital repair manuals, an online parts store, and equipment designed to be easily disassembled and repaired directly by the farmer. Freedom of resources: permanent field presence enables hyper-precision. Solix treats only what a field needs dynamically, drastically reducing herbicide use, fuel consumption, and chemical exposure for surrounding communities.

In the beginning, the closed system worked reasonably well. But think about what it means for a farmer’s very first decision: which machine to buy comes down to how close the dealer is, not the color or model they’d actually prefer, just which dealer is nearby if something breaks down mid-season.

We don’t believe farmers should be limited that way. They should be free to buy whatever they want and, if something goes wrong, to fix it themselves, with a mechanic of their choosing or with their own hands.

Yes, that model is ending. We’re a technology company. We don’t want to sell parts, and we don’t want to provide support for things farmers can do themselves.

That’s why we provide smart glasses with digital repair manuals, so farmers can look at the machine and fix problems themselves, and an online parts store where they can buy what they need and take the machine apart and put it back together on their own. It’s their equipment and their choice. Our robot is simple, and something that simple should be easy for a farmer to fix. I don’t want any of our revenue to come from selling parts. I’d rather give farmers the freedom to choose, along with the support they need — a digital manual, smart glasses, a step-by-step guide — to assess and fix things themselves and make their lives easier.

During my time at Solinftec, I’ve worked across different parts of the company and seen a lot of change, including in the concepts we build around.

What has kept us growing is our commitment to being disruptive: not just launching products that make farms more efficient, but finding ways to make old approaches obsolete. That’s where “living the field” comes from. There’s technology behind it, and a robot, but it’s the concept itself that’s changing how we produce food.

What excites me most is that we keep disrupting our own technology, building solutions that replace what came before, because we know we have to keep developing and growing fast. That’s true well beyond agriculture. With AI advancing so quickly, we want to be at the forefront for farmers, who haven’t had many of these opportunities. Our main goal is to bring the kind of technology we use in daily life onto their farms.

Yes, every day. Most of our technology is built on AI, backed by more than a decade of data processing and AI development. We learn from the data we process each year and return those insights to the farm. That long history with AI is what allows us to create these new concepts. AI helps us move our products forward faster.

Our technology is about “living the field” so farmers have the freedom to live beyond it. We’re bringing hardware and the latest innovations into everything we do, and the pace keeps accelerating. As machines become smaller and more specialized, dependence on operators is falling, and the farmer’s role will shift from operating heavy machinery to orchestrating automated outcomes. For a century, agriculture has sent large machines into the field to perform a task and leave; the next era of farming will be defined by intelligent systems that remain in the field, continuously deciding and acting in real time. If I can sum it up: we don’t just launch products. We introduce new concepts that reshape how we think about agriculture, then build the technology to make those ideas real.