About
A mix of producers,
engineers and researchers
FDF Labs is a field AI systems company based in Asunción, Paraguay. It was born in 2018 as a working commercial farm and evolved into an R&D lab whose projects now deploy across forests, rivers and cities.
Origin
How it started
FDF Hidroponia was born in 2018 as a commercial hydroponics facility in Asunción. What started as a productive farm transformed with each growing cycle: plant health, disease detection, efficiency. Those questions turned the greenhouse into an AI R&D lab that still operates as a working farm.
Questions about detection, classification and deployment in uncontrolled environments soon pointed outward. Toward the dry forests of the Gran Chaco, where illegal deforestation goes unnoticed. Toward the rivers of the Río de la Plata Basin, where ichthyological monitoring remains manual and sporadic. Toward the streets of Asunción, where road conditions are everyone's problem and nobody's data.
Each project took us further from the greenhouse and deeper into the field. The common thread: systems built for real conditions — heat, humidity, murky water, unpaved roads and intermittent connectivity.
Headquarters
The greenhouse
Our physical headquarters is a 650 m² hydroponic lettuce facility in Asunción. It produces approximately 100,000 heads of lettuce per year. It is also the environment where we test every system before deploying it in the field.
A model that cannot detect diseases in well-lit lettuce has no business trying to classify fish in murky river water. Every deployment starts here. The greenhouse is where we verify that a system can survive contact with the real world.
Operating greenhouse
Heads of lettuce
Operating since
Data capture
Team
Who we are
Fernando Fretes
Agronomist by training and large-scale soy producer. Has held COO roles at multinational companies and developed carbon projects across 187,000 hectares. At FDF Labs he leads system design, prototyping and field deployment. He founded FDF Hidroponia in 2018 as the convergence point between agronomy, operations and applied technology.
Agustín Blanc
Project Manager at Nestlé LATAM, where he coordinated digital initiatives across 12 markets. At FDF Labs he bridges what works in the lab with what can be deployed in the field, designing automation frameworks, model validation and edge device operations.
The team is rounded out by computer vision engineers, data infrastructure specialists and field biologists with regional taxonomic expertise.
“A research institution with the speed of a startup. A technology company that actually goes into the field.”
Work with us
We work with research institutions, environmental agencies and governments that need AI systems capable of operating in the real world.
Contact Us