Agronomists and engineers who farm the data.

CropKern was started by people who have walked fields and written satellite processing pipelines. That combination is not accidental.

The people who built it

Daniel Ferreira

Daniel Ferreira

CEO and Co-Founder

Daniel spent eight years as an independent agronomy consultant covering operations across Iowa and Illinois before co-founding CropKern. He holds a Certified Crop Adviser designation and has been integrating remote sensing into field recommendations since the first Sentinel-2 data became available in 2015. He built the original yield forecast pipeline on his own farm test plots in 2021.

Priya Nair

Priya Nair

CTO and Co-Founder

Priya came to CropKern from a remote sensing research position at Iowa State University, where she focused on multispectral image classification for crop-type mapping. She architected the satellite ingestion and feature extraction pipeline and leads the machine learning infrastructure. Her graduate work on red-edge band fusion is the basis for the canopy stress detection module.

Marcus Webb

Marcus Webb

Head of Agronomy

Marcus reviews every model update before production deployment and manages the grower advisory relationships. He has 12 years of field agronomy experience across corn, soybean, and winter wheat in the Corn Belt. Marcus maintains the crop phenology curve library and runs the seasonal accuracy audit that CropKern publishes after each harvest.

A team built around field credibility

We are a small team at Seed stage. Here is what that means in practice.

Des Moines, IA

We are headquartered in the Corn Belt on purpose. Site visits are part of onboarding, not a premium add-on.

Field-first decisions

Every product change is reviewed against a real agronomic use case. If it does not improve a field-level decision, we do not ship it.

Academic partnerships

Active research collaboration with Iowa State University's Remote Sensing Lab for satellite classification methodology review.

Grower advisory panel

Eight independent growers from across the Corn Belt review platform changes quarterly and contribute yield ground-truth data for model validation.

We are hiring for two roles

ML Platform Engineer

Own the model training infrastructure and feature store. Experience with geospatial data formats (GeoTIFF, netCDF, GeoJSON) required. Remote-sensing background is a strong plus but not required if you have time-series ML experience.

Full-time, Des Moines or remote within US time zones.

Field Implementation Engineer

Manage sensor network installations, parcel boundary onboarding, and irrigation system integrations for new Enterprise customers. Agricultural background and comfort with field hardware required. Travel approximately 40%.

Full-time, based in Iowa or Illinois.

Interested in joining?

We do not have a formal applications page yet. Send a short note about your background and what draws you to precision agriculture to team@cropkernx.com. We respond to every message.

Contact us

Small team. Real fields. Actual yield data.

We are at the stage where every new customer relationship matters. We answer the phone and we do site visits.

Talk to us