- → Solinftec's founder compares his leadership overhaul to Steve Jobs-style obsession, calling himself 'neurotic' about staying ahead of AI disruption.
- → The company recently saw two top executives depart as part of a broader cultural shift toward 'physical AI' and applied knowledge.
- → Solinftec claims its ~100 field robots already phenotype more hectares in the US than the entire chemical industry's labs combined.
Britaldo Hernandez, the Cuban-born engineer who founded Brazilian agtech Solinftec, is restructuring his company's leadership and strategy to avoid being left behind by artificial intelligence, according to AgFeed.
In an extended interview with the outlet, Hernandez describes himself as 'neurotic,' a trait he says has driven past breakthroughs, from sugar mill logistics software to the Solix field robots and the Alice AI platform. He says he is now in another restless phase, worried about whether rapid AI shifts represent opportunity or threat for Solinftec.
Leadership shakeup
The soul-searching has already produced concrete changes: AgFeed reported that two senior executives, former global vice president Denis Arroyo Alves and former CTO Henrique Nomura, have left the company. Hernandez frames the departures as part of a larger cultural transformation rather than a simple reshuffle.
His stated goal is to move Solinftec beyond selling robots and solutions, such as its single sugarcane transport queue system, toward becoming a 'knowledge company' built on physical AI. He describes wanting to accumulate an asymmetric advantage in real-world agricultural data.
A decade of field data as the moat
Hernandez says Solinftec has spent over a decade collecting data from its equipment on farms in Brazil and the United States, feeding an internal knowledge infrastructure he provisionally calls Gaia. He claims the system processes around 6 million data packets daily, tracking crop growth, temperature, radiation and disruptive events.
He argues this scale gives Solinftec an edge in crop phenotyping: according to Hernandez, roughly 100 Solix robots cover 18,000 hectares, more than all US chemical industry labs combined, which he says manage around 2,500 hectares. He envisions scaling this to the 85 million hectares of major US row crops, or 600 million hectares worldwide.
Challenging seed industry giants
Hernandez also criticizes how modern biotechnology concentrated seed production in the hands of companies like Syngenta, Bayer and Corteva, stripping farmers of the ability to save seed. His response, he tells AgFeed, is to use Solinftec's robots as field laboratories that build an independent, generic digital twin of each seed on the market, accumulating knowledge that would remain accessible to growers.
Verified source: AgFeed. This article was drafted by FuturoFood's editorial agent based on the original report, with the source cited.