From losing 70% of its market to a global comeback: How OneSoil turned crisis into opportunity

Swiss agtech startup OneSoil was built on satellite imagery, and that turned into both its strength and its problem. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the company found itself exposed to two markets that made up about 70% of its audience and were supposed to drive its product launch. Overnight, that plan was gone.

OneSoil had started in 2017, after the Sentinel-2 satellite programme launched. Its first product let farmers monitor fields remotely, spot vegetation changes, and plan inspections without driving across thousands of hectares. The company later built OneSoil Pro, a more advanced precision agriculture tool with variable-rate fertiliser and seed application for compatible machinery. It had invested heavily in that launch before the war disrupted everything.

Then came the hard reset. OneSoil chose not to monetise in Russia, kept supporting Ukrainian farmers, relocated staff, cut costs and changed course. Kheistver says the team went through three rounds of layoffs and shrank from roughly 70 to 80 people before the war to around 30 today. All three co-founders eventually left, and the company rebuilt its leadership around international markets, precision agriculture and AI.

The new map looks very different from the old one. Europe is still important, with Poland singled out, but Africa has become OneSoil’s second-biggest revenue region, led by South Africa. The company also works in Kenya and Tanzania and is pushing toward Nigeria. Latin America looked promising at first, especially Brazil and Argentina, yet it proved harder than expected because of competition, economic pressure and the habit of bundling digital tools with inputs at no extra cost.

Financially, OneSoil has also shifted away from the old startup religion of chasing one big growth metric and hoping for acquisition later. Since 2024, it says revenue is up 106% versus 2021, it raised $1 million earlier this year, and it reached break-even in 2025. It expects negative EBITDA in 2026 because it is still investing in scale. The company now says it has healthier unit economics and a more sustainable base.

Its newest push is an AI agronomist inside the mobile app, which OneSoil says is the first globally available version of that kind. Farmers can start using it without a sales call or even an email address. The system combines satellite imagery, weather data, field boundaries, crop recognition and productivity-zone models, then asks follow-up questions when it needs more evidence before making a recommendation. That caution matters in agriculture, where bad advice can cost real money fast. OneSoil says it has about 140,000 annual users monitoring around 70 million hectares, and it wants to be the first digital tool farmers reach for — not another system built only for giant farms with expensive kit.