[K-Smart Farm] A smart farm powered by 1,767 years’ worth of big data… n.thing CEO Kim Hye-yeon: “We will set the global standard for agriculture”

Amid the triple challenge of climate change, a shrinking rural population, and a harsh winter for startup investment, n.thing, one of Korea’s leading agtech companies, is drawing attention based on its technological capabilities and improved business fundamentals. In December 2025, n.thing succeeded in turning profitable on a monthly operating profit basis, completing the smart farm industry’s long-standing task of “proving profitability.” We met CEO Kim Hye-yeon, who went from an IT youth absorbed in programming during high school to a leader now pursuing global agricultural standards, to hear the story of n.thing’s innovative growth and the blueprint for a new distribution ecosystem that agriculture’s AI transformation (AX) will bring.

High school experiences sparked the idea of an “agriculture OS”
CEO Kim Hye-yeon, from Icheon in Gyeonggi Province, first learned computers in the third grade of elementary school through a sisterhood program with Hyundai Electronics, which opened her eyes to the web. From around the second year of middle school, she taught herself programming and showed entrepreneurial instincts by creating websites for neighborhood shops during high school.

In her senior year of high school, Kim attended the launch ceremony of the Youth Venture Association held in Myeong-dong, where she was struck by business cards labeled “CEO” handed to her by students her age. From then on, she nurtured a dream of starting a business. After entering Hanyang University’s Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Kim developed her analytical ability to anticipate IoT (Internet of Things) trends and climate change-driven shifts in global industries through a short-term internship at SK Telecom in 2007.

After returning to university, her life reached a turning point when she stepped into the field at the recommendation of her uncle, who was running a greenhouse construction business in Pocheon, Gyeonggi Province. While building a tomato greenhouse in Uzbekistan and leading a joint venture there, the second growing season was completely ruined due to the absence of a cultivation expert. This experience completely changed Kim’s approach to business.

“Just as there is an operating system (OS) that controls hardware and software, I realized agriculture also needs a standardized environmental control system that helps anyone grow crops easily. n.thing began with my determination to innovate agriculture with standardized technology beyond the spatial constraints of rural areas,” Kim recalled of her thoughts and experience at the time.

Later, based on 20 million won in seed funding secured after winning the top prize in Google’s startup support program in 2013, Kim founded smart farm technology company n.thing in January 2014.

Turned to monthly operating profit in the black last December… the secret to restructuring: lower logistics costs and stronger R&D
n.thing’s turnaround is the result of a close interaction between advanced R&D and the discovery of fixed demand channels.

Kim explained, “Losses had continued due to large investments in facilities and equipment and spending on hardware R&D, but we secured profitability by maximizing production efficiency through freshness-preservation technology, lower logistics costs, and the discovery of stable buyers.”

In fact, n.thing introduced a “Near-Farm” approach by building cultivation facilities right next to the parking lot of E-Mart’s fresh food logistics center in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province. Through this, it supplies E-Mart from very close range, dramatically reducing logistics and distribution costs from nearly 70% in the past to the current 2–3%. 

In addition, one of the key materials used in containers, LED lighting, was localized in China, reducing the unit cost—including logistics—from around 100,000 won per unit to $3.5 (less than about 5,000 won), cutting CAPEX and OPEX by more than 95%.

And through internalized R&D, the standardized container environment, in which external contaminants are completely blocked, made it possible to fully exclude around 500 types of harmful bacteria and fungi, including E. coli, from inside the farm (E. coli count: 0).  As a result, it prevented vegetables from easily softening in summer or freezing in winter, keeping the disposal rate below 5% and extending post-harvest storage periods to as long as one month.

n.thing’s technology infrastructure: FARM OS, CUBE, GIGA Farm
n.thing’s technology system is divided into the software “FARM OS,” the distributed modular container “CUBE,” and “GIGA Farm,” a large-scale, logistics-integrated facility built by scaling them up.

In particular, GIGA Farm, emerging as a key next-generation growth engine, is a large logistics-center-type vertical farm with a single-site scale of 4,000 pyeong and annual output of more than 1,000 tons. It is a mega-infrastructure model that handles not only cultivation but also processing, pre-treatment, and logistics distribution in a one-stop system.

According to n.thing, while ordinary open-field farming allows cultivation one to three times a year, GIGA Farm enables 13 to 17 cultivation cycles annually. Based on this cultivation environment, output can be increased by 60 to 70 times per year compared with open-field farming on the same area (per building unit). Based on this proprietary vertical farm design model, n.thing won the Best of Innovation award at CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics exhibition, and repeatedly obtained a TI-2 rating (very excellent) in Technology Credit Bureau (TCB) evaluations. In particular, it became the first in the vertical farming industry to obtain Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) certification, which transparently discloses environmental impact, allowing it to pass the strict ESG procurement standards of major corporate partners.

Distribution AX led by ‘N.FARM.AI,’ a big data platform equivalent to 1,767 years
Another differentiator built by n.thing lies in the sophisticated accumulation of agricultural data. Its agricultural big data platform, “N.FARM.AI,” contains an enormous volume of cumulative data equivalent to as much as 1,767 years based on open-field cultivation standards.

Kim explained, “A vertical farm can cultivate up to 17 times a year, and 28 different optimized control settings with different light intensity, nutrient solution, temperature, and humidity are accumulated in real time every day through n.thing’s network of 20 to 30 farms nationwide.” She added, “The density of the data is incomparably higher than open-field data from uncontrolled natural conditions.”

n.thing designed the system so that AI can suggest the optimal shipping timing by linking this controlled cultivation data with 10 years of nationwide weather information and price data from 33 wholesale markets across the country.

In the past, there was a prejudice that vegetables from vertical farms lacked flavor, but the company gained market trust by perfecting technology that fundamentally blocks climate variables and finely adjusts texture, sweetness, and even size. According to Kim, the only remaining task now is the stable expansion of production capacity.

Having anticipated the growth of the European lettuce market in advance and increased its supply ratio to E-Mart, n.thing has also diversified fixed trading lines with food service and major food companies such as Samsung Welstory and Ottogi. By forecasting fixed demand and raising factory utilization close to 100%, it has been able to build a stable portfolio.

Beyond North America and the Middle East, toward becoming “a company that feeds the world”
After successfully establishing a large number of container-type cube farms in the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East, n.thing has recently expanded into an ODA (Official Development Assistance) project in Indonesia and is ultimately staking its future on entering the North American market.

In advanced countries such as the United States and Europe, the agricultural population is rapidly declining (to less than 1% of the total population), creating a situation in which the corporatization of smart agriculture centered on large building-type vertical farms is being urgently demanded. In response, n.thing is gradually building global competitiveness as a next-generation infrastructure model with an integrated solution that fully transcends climate and geographical barriers.

Recently, it also joined hands with the National Institute of Horticultural and Herbal Science under the Rural Development Administration to actively engage in developing “mass production technology for high-quality strawberry seedlings,” the foundation of high-value-added crops.

Currently, n.thing’s smart farm cultivation and temperature-humidity control are 100% automated, but harvesting and packaging still depend on on-site labor. The company plans to fully apply robotic automation systems to this area within two to three years at the latest, ushering in the era of unmanned farms in earnest.

Asked about short-term and long-term goals, Kim said, “Our short-term goals are to expand domestic production capacity and establish ourselves in the North American market. In the long term, we aim to become a global agricultural distribution infrastructure company that feeds the world by supplying overseas crops in Korea and Korean K-foods (such as strawberries) in overseas markets all year round.”