Nova Ventures, an investment firm specializing in space and deep tech, said Thursday it has made a Pre-A round investment in Saepum, a crop cultivation solution company that combines artificial-satellite data and artificial intelligence (AI). Based on its ability to identify space and aerospace startups, Nova Ventures assessed Saepum’s potential as one of the companies delivering the fastest commercial results in downstream applications of space technology.
Founded in June 2022, Saepum is an innovative precision agriculture company that analyzes satellite imagery with AI to diagnose crop growth conditions at the field level and provide tailored cultivation guidance. By securing data from 12 global satellite providers, including high-resolution, hyperspectral and SAR, it analyzed more than 500 million agriculture and forestry satellite data points on 35 crops over the past five years. After applying the results to about 8,000 farms in South Korea and 200,000 hectares (ha) of farmland worldwide, the company said it achieved a notable outcome: cultivation volume rose 18%, and its detection rate for crop diseases, pests and abnormal signs reached 95%.
A representative technology application is the “Agriculture and Forestry Satellite Image AI Analysis Technology-Utilized Production Complex Decision-Making System,” developed jointly with the Gyeonggi Provincial Agricultural Research and Extension Services and Yeoncheon County. Using 0.7m-class high-resolution imagery and AI analysis, the system measures growth status every day and immediately notifies users of abnormal signs. It received recognition for accuracy based on data from 168 rice farms and 52 soybean farms in the Yeoncheon area, and won the “CES 2026 Innovation Award.” Currently, Saepum’s solution is expanding its application scope to various local governments and crops, including contract rice farms of Nonghyup in the region and Nongbu’s soybean contract farms, as well as garlic in Uiseong County and soybeans in Goesan County.
The ability to understand crop growth from satellite images alone—without site visits or separate equipment—gives the company strong competitiveness in the global market. The solution has already been deployed through Nongbu’s contract farms in Russia, Canada and the United States. In Indonesia, it exported services covering about 25,000 hectares. In Uzbekistan, it is in the middle of a 90-hectare technical demonstration project (PoC) after signing a memorandum of understanding with the local agriculture ministry. It is also pushing harder into overseas markets by concluding an export contract with the Malaysian precision agriculture firm MKR Hartamas.
Park Ji-young, CEO of Nova Ventures, said the investment background was that, “Amid a situation in which it has become difficult to pass down cultivation know-how due to climate change and a decline in the number of farm households, I felt that the space economy era has taken root in everyday life through Saepum, which provides solutions using satellite data and AI technology.” Saepum CEO Jung Seung-hwan said, “A new agricultural paradigm is urgently needed in the face of climate crises such as extreme heat,” adding, “We will build a nationwide cultivation method based on satellite AI data and complete a solution that allows farming to be carried out automatically even when farmers do not go directly to their plots.”
Meanwhile, Nova Ventures is a specialized investment firm that has focused on nurturing homegrown technologies in the space sector, including by forming the “Nova K-SPACE Investment Fund.” With the recent entry into the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite era creating an environment in which satellite data can be secured at a reasonable cost, demand for AI-driven analysis in agriculture based on satellite data is expected to surge explosively going forward.
