Yharvest: Unlocking Soil Intelligence via Real-Time AI Diagnostics and Precision Agriculture
The Pitch
“Our core mission is to help farmers visualize exactly what is happening inside their soil between traditional laboratory measurements”, says Serhii Zlobov, Founder and CEO of Yharvest. While legacy agriculture relies on slow physical soil probes conducted once a year or even once a decade, Yharvest provides actionable soil data-as-a-service. By pairing live in-field sensors with advanced predictive AI analytics, the platform tracks nutrient traction, monitors moisture deviations, and evaluates fertilizer dissolution in real time. Operating a battlefield-tested infrastructure, Yharvest enables global farms to maximize crop yields and cut heavy chemical dependencies.
The Spark: Finding the ‘Ground Truth’ of Soil DNA
The foundation of Yharvest was built on correcting a fundamental flaw in early agricultural AI modeling. Initially, the team attempted to feed raw, unrefined field data into machine learning systems to generate crop predictions. The results were highly inaccurate, exposing a massive market pain point: for AI to truly revolutionize agriculture, it requires high-density, highly labeled “ground truth” data data-layers.
The project sparked organically during a collaborative discussion between field agronomists and university professors who noted that standard annual lab probes completely failed to reflect the daily, shifting realities of soil DNA. To bridge this scientific gap, Serhii partnered with Andrey Kapritsa, a prominent Ukrainian farmer, advanced agronomist and digital content creator. This collaboration allowed the startup to validate its initial engineering assumptions directly within the farming community and build a highly calibrated, data-dense infrastructure from the ground up.
The Reality: Overcoming Ancestral Inertia and Wartime Demographics
Introducing deep tech into agriculture means navigating a deeply conservative industry where generations of farmers prefer to replicate exactly what their grandfathers did. Yharvest overcomes this traditional barrier by leveraging the intense competitiveness of the market; when a farmer sees a neighbor’s fields looking noticeably greener or yielding higher output, they immediately demand the underlying technology.
Deploying physical hardware under active real-world conditions introduces unexpected operational variables. During a large-scale pilot with MHP, the team carefully installed custom telemetry sensors across active fields, only for the data stream to completely go dark a week later. A field investigation revealed that a herd of wild pigs had rooted through the crop, dug up the telemetry units, and completely eaten them – cementing wildlife-proofing as a mandatory milestone on the company’s deep-tech engineering roadmap.
More critically, Yharvest addresses a profound demographic crisis within wartime Ukraine, which faces a severe shortage of agricultural specialists due to military mobilization and migration. Traditionally, a single skilled agronomist can manually oversee a maximum of 1,000 hectares. Yharvest’s remote data platform completely redefines this operational capacity, allowing a single specialist to successfully manage between 4,000 and 5,000 hectares via centralized digital oversight, directly sustaining national food security under pressure.
The Technology & The Global Natural Edge
The Drop in Chemical Demand: Driven by skyrocketing global fertilizer costs and tightening international environmental policies, Yharvest’s real-time nutrient mapping enables industrial farms to decrease chemical fertilizer application by up to 50% while maintaining exceptionally high crop yields.
The 500 Soil Types Advantage: Yharvest possesses an unparalleled data-training asset. Ukraine contains over 500 distinct soil types across its territory; its northern geography mirrors the soil composition of Canada, while its western regions match the soil profiles of Germany, Poland, and Luxembourg. This immense ecological diversity allows Yharvest to train highly sophisticated, cost-efficient data models locally and scale them seamlessly to any agricultural market on Earth.
Hard Facts & Traction
Elite Academic Validation: Successfully completed the prestigious USAID AGRO program in direct collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, and the UC Davis tech accelerator, rigorously proving that Yharvest’s data layers can accurately predict protein levels in soy and track precise sugar and acidity curves in premium grapes.
Macro-Policy Engagement: Concluded high-level strategic policy discussions at the Nexus event in Luxembourg with the European Commission, positioning Yharvest’s data frameworks as a core mechanism to help the European Union meet its regulatory chemical reduction goals.
Industrial Scale: Actively running extensive commercial pilot programs in Ukraine alongside massive agricultural conglomerates that collectively manage over 750,000 hectares of land.
The VivaTech 2026 Roadmap: Current Needs
As Yharvest joins the official delegation in Paris, the company is utilizing its highly successful viticulture pilots as a strategic entry point into the high-value European and global wine markets.
Premium Vineyard Pilots: Expanding on brilliant results tracked throughout the grape vegetation periods in Ukraine, Yharvest is actively advancing pilot negotiations with Italian wineries and utilizing VivaTech to lock in commercial partnerships with premier French vineyards.
Global Viticulture Expansion: Looking past Europe, the company is establishing pilot parameters in California’s Napa Valley and collaborating directly with the Embassy of Argentina in Kyiv to expand its sensor infrastructure into the Mendoza wine region.
Impact Capital Alignment: Engaging with international agtech and impact investors who share their vision of global, data-driven precision farming.
Where to Connect in Paris:
June 16: Meet Serhii in person at the premier official side event, Ukrainian Tech Night (The Village by Crédit Agricole Paris).
Main Forum: Experience the precision telemetry systems and meet the team at the official Ukrainian National Pavilion, J16.
The Horizon: Engineering a Global AgTech Unicorn
Yharvest is built on an absolute scale of global ambition. While the team acknowledges the value of building a successful million-dollar enterprise, their predictive data models and natural geographical advantages have placed the company on a clear trajectory to scale internationally, with the explicit roadmap of becoming a multi-billion-dollar global agtech unicorn within the next 5 to 7 years.
Listen to the Full Story
Explore the deep data science, environmental optimization, and unexpected field realities driving this precision agriculture breakthrough. Listen to the complete conversation between host Natalia Petrova and Yharvest Founder and CEO Serhii Zlobov.
