About SAGE
Better intelligence for the land, and everyone who depends on it.
SAGE is a public benefit company building risk intelligence for agricultural land. Its AI engine fuses a century of human knowledge on soil, water and agricultural practice to understand risk at the level of a single field, starting with crop insurance.
Farming is getting riskier every year.
Shifting weather, degrading soil, rising input costs and more volatile markets are changing what land can grow and what it costs to protect it. The systems that price cropland risk have not kept pace.
Insurance is the most sophisticated pricer of risk, so SAGE starts there: crop insurance that sees each field on its own, and rewards the farmers who manage their land for resilience.
Who we are
A world-class team of inventors and builders.
Taking advantage of recent advances in AI, we are inventing what was previously impossible: the Soil Analytics Geospatial Engine (SAGE).
- 01Artificial intelligence and technology
- 02Farming and land management
- 03Public policy and government
- 04Soil science
Bill Veghte
CEO and co-founder
A technology builder and leader with deep farming roots that has led the teams that built technology used by billions of people and millions of businesses across every wave of technology for the last 35 years in senior leadership roles at HP, Microsoft and others.
LinkedInRobert Bonnie
Co-founder
Oversaw the federal crop insurance system as USDA's Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation, after three decades in land conservation, agriculture and forestry.
LinkedInDeon Blaauw
Co-founder and Chief Product Officer
Grew up on farms in southern Namibia and has spent more than two decades engineering frontier AI and safety-critical autonomous systems. Leads the SAGE product, from the engine to the tools growers and insurers use every day.
LinkedIn
Our story
A family connection to the land.
SAGE is personal. Farming has been in my family for generations. My grandfather's family lost their farm during the Great Depression and he dedicated his life to helping Iowa farmers manage risk. I grew up on a farm in New Hampshire. While farming is in my blood, I spent my professional life building technology as a product leader and as a senior leader at companies like HP and Microsoft. I always wanted to build SAGE and with the advancements in AI, I am finally able to deliver better insights for better decisions on every field and every landscape.
Bill VeghteCEO and co-founderLinkedIn
Farming has been part of Bill's life since he was a child, and he manages farm and conservation land today. He has also spent nearly four decades building software through every major shift in the industry, as an engineering leader, an EVP, a president and a CEO at a myriad of technology companies from start-up to Fortune 10. Advances in AI made it possible to build what he had long wanted to build: a platform that brings better intelligence to the risk and resilience of a single field, and of the landscapes it belongs to, for the farmers that farm it.
Why it matters
Rewarding the land that is farmed well.
After three decades in land conservation and agriculture, I understand the importance of rewarding farmers for the practices that make their land more resilient. Until now, we couldn't do it. That's the gap SAGE is built to close.
Robert BonnieCo-founderLinkedIn
Robert oversaw the federal crop insurance system as USDA's Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation, after three decades in land conservation, agriculture and forestry. He is widely regarded as one of the nation's foremost authorities on working-lands conservation.
How it is built
From the engine to the field.
Growing up through severe droughts on farms in southern Namibia, I learned early what happens when the land loses its margin for error. In a volatile climate, historical intuition is no longer enough to protect it. I have spent two decades engineering frontier AI and autonomous, safety critical systems for complex environments. With SAGE, we are putting frontier intelligence into the service of our soil, giving land stewards the answers they need for the long haul.
Deon BlaauwCo-founder and Chief Product OfficerLinkedIn
Living through severe droughts on farms in southern Namibia taught Deon early how fragile our relationship with the land truly is. He has spent more than two decades at the bleeding edge of engineering, inventing safety-critical autonomous systems, multi-agent frameworks, and physics-informed AI. As climate volatility demands a fundamentally new approach to land intelligence, SAGE is where his trajectory culminates: deploying frontier technology to translate complex soil physics into the protection and resilience our planet urgently needs.
What SAGE does
Fuse, interrogate, infer, reason.
The core of the SAGE AI engine. It lets us combine kinds of data that could never be combined at scale before, and read them for one field at a time.
Fuse
Soil, water, weather, satellite and the records of the people who farm, brought together.
Interrogate
Every field read on its own, layer by layer, season by season.
Infer
What the ground is likely to do next, and why.
Reason
Ideas and risk signals that growers, insurers and lenders can act on.
A public benefit company
Resilient land, for everyone who depends on it.
SAGE is a public benefit company, built to serve the land and the people who depend on it, not only its investors.
Better insight into each field helps growers protect their land and their margins, helps insurers and lenders price risk fairly, and helps build a more resilient and sustainable future for the land.
