Local-First AI for Agriculture

AI that works where your farm does

Turn sensor noise into clear decisions — on-site, offline-ready, and built for the people who grow our food.

On-site inference Your data never leaves your farm Born at NC State
The Problem

Your farm generates data. But data is not a decision.

Sensors, weather reports, lab results, and compliance files — all siloed, hard to interpret, and useless without timely action.

Fragmented Data

Sensors, lab reports, and compliance docs scattered across systems. Signals exist, but they're disconnected.

Hard to Interpret

Raw readings and convoluted dashboards force specialists to decode data before anyone can act.

Unreliable Connectivity

Cloud tools assume stable internet. Farms and rural field environments rarely have that luxury.

Time-Critical Decisions

Water quality shifts and disease risks become expensive when guidance arrives an hour too late.

Product Architecture

Three layers. One clear decision.

01

SustainAI Sense

Ingestion Layer

Connects to existing field hardware — water monitors, soil sensors, weather stations — and normalizes fragmented signals into usable data.

02

SustainAI Hub

On-site Intelligence Layer

Runs fine-tuned language models, retrieval pipelines, and knowledge graph generation — entirely on-site, entirely private.

03

SustainAI Edge

Operator Interface

Turns complexity into simple, explainable outputs — decision-ready alerts sent directly to a phone or barn display.

Initial Market Use Cases

Built for the workflows that matter.

Water Quality Monitoring

Proactive anomaly detection across private wells to prevent contamination before safety thresholds are breached.

Nutrient & Runoff Risk

Combines soil, weather, and sensor data to identify fertilization imbalances or runoff warnings in real time.

Environmental Condition Alerts

Alerts teams to disease risks or hazardous spikes via multi-sensor synthesis — even during internet outages.

Compliance & Reporting

Reasons over county regulations and operational data to deliver immediate, grounded answers on safety protocols.

The Operator Experience

It is 5:30 in the morning. Your phone buzzes. Once.

The SustainAI system flagged an overnight shift in water conductivity at the south well. Based on your soil type and recent weather, it suggests possible contamination from field runoff.

Because the system had a connection last night, it already pulled the latest county advisory and cross-referenced your readings. It's showing you two recommended actions in three sentences.

You didn't open a dashboard. You didn't call a consultant. You didn't wait for a cloud server. The answer was already there — generated on your property, by a system that understands your farm.

Our Mission

Field operations need small, powerful AI — not disconnected cloud models.

We combine on-site sensor data, private documents, and domain knowledge into one modular system that helps teams decide faster. Local-first, explainable, built for environments where connectivity is inconsistent and action cannot wait.

My father is a farmer. I grew up watching him walk the fields before sunrise, checking soil by feel. He didn't have sensors or software. He had experience. And most of the time, that was enough. But when it was not, the cost was real. — Deepak Sai Pendyala, CEO

SustainAI comes from direct exposure to the realities of agriculture. In many field environments, important decisions rely on fragmented information and tools that don't fit the conditions on the ground. We built SustainAI to close that gap.

Technical Foundation

Not theoretical. Proven.

PASTOR, our first working system, integrated thousands of scientific papers into a citation-grounded knowledge base. That exact architecture now powers SustainAI for agriculture — proving massive data can be unified rapidly with trust and traceability.

5,000+
Papers integrated
98%
Citation precision
<6s
Response time
99.7%
Faster than manual
Why SustainAI

Built different. On purpose.

Local-first, not offline-only

Core reasoning happens on site. The system doesn't fail when the internet drops.

Right-sized AI

No oversized general-purpose models. Smaller, efficient, domain-tuned models built for the task.

Domain-grounded reasoning

Combines models with operational context, scientific input, and real-world field signals.

Decision-first design

Most tools stop at analytics. We help you decide what to do next.

The Core Team

Turning domain science into field reality.

A team of researchers and builders turning years of applied AI and domain science into a right-sized system that works where it is needed.

Dr. Yaroslava G. Yingling
Dr. Yaroslava G. Yingling
Founder
Associate Head & Kobe Steel Distinguished Professor, NC State University

University Faculty Scholar and Director of Undergraduate Programs in Materials Science & Engineering. She brings deep scientific rigor and applied AI expertise to the foundation.

LinkedIn
Deepak Sai Pendyala
Deepak Sai Pendyala
CEO · Co-Founder
Masters in Computer Science, NC State University

Leads product architecture, edge AI systems, and the vision from research prototype to field-deployable infrastructure. Focuses heavily on local-first modularity.

LinkedIn
Nahed Abu Zaid
Nahed Abu Zaid
CTO · Founding Team
PhD Student - Computer Science, NC State University

Leads the knowledge graph architecture, citation-grounded retrieval, and multi-agent systems giving SustainAI its ability to reason across fragmented sources securely.

LinkedIn
Dr. Alexey Gulyuk
Dr. Alexey Gulyuk
Materials Science Expert · Founding Team
Ph.D. Materials Science & Engineering

Faculty at NC State bringing deep materials science expertise to ground SustainAI's sensor and hardware integration in validated physical science methodologies.

LinkedIn
Dr. Ramesh Lakshmi Ratan
Dr. Ramesh Lakshmi Ratan
Board Advisor · Founding Team
Board Director · Retired PE CEO

Decades of leadership in digital and quantitative technology, bringing immense commercialization strategy and scaling expertise to the architectural foundation.

LinkedIn

Let's build this together.

We're piloting with 3–5 farms and water utilities. If you have sensors, field challenges, and a desire to move faster — we want to talk.

Tell us about your sensor mix and field conditions.