Grain market ‘analyst in your pocket’

Mark Lepp grew up on a 5,000-acre grain farm near Elm Creek, but he never took to farming the way his father and two younger brothers did.

“I probably frustrated everyone around me,” he said. “The real art of farming — I was not that artist.”

That hasn’t stopped the entrepreneur from making a name for himself in agriculture. In 2004, he co-founded FarmLink Marketing Solutions, which pioneered the business of providing personalized marketing recommendations for Western Canadian farmers.

“I always liked the economics part (of farming),” Lepp said. “I liked the business part.”

In 2023, the Winnipeg company rebranded as GrainFox when it launched a digital product with the same name.

Using artificial intelligence, input from the company’s analytical teams, current and historical market data and regional aggregate data, the product provides up-to-date, personalized crop sales recommendations to producers through a mobile app and online portal.

GrainFox took the technology further in November, when it unveiled Sinoa, an AI-powered grain market analyst built to deliver real-time and on-demand market intelligence, personalized insights and expert analysis.

Instead of being a general-purpose chatbot, Sinoa is built to help grain producers and agribusiness users get fast, practical answers to real grain marketing questions that are grounded in analyst expertise, decades of proprietary grain market data and intelligence, and sector-specific context.

“We built Sinoa to be more of an interaction and literally like an analyst in your pocket,” Lepp said.

“You can type it or you can (use your voice to) ask the question: how much inventory do I have? How much canola do I have left to sell? What should my strategy be on this? And it’ll just get back to you.”

GrainFox made two acquisitions in the last 4 1/2 years that enhanced its analytical capabilities.

The company purchased Ontario analytical firm and publisher DePutter Publishing in 2021, and acquired Kostal Ag Consulting in 2024.

“We literally have 80 years of experience and data in our platform today that is always learning and always getting better,” Lepp said. “And the information’s always (up to the minute).

“So if something happened tonight and the (Iran) war’s over, you can literally ask, what does the impact of the war ending in Iran mean to my crop strategies and my approach? And it will provide that (information).”

GrainFox, which has around 24 employees, started building Sinoa in 2025.

After testing it last summer, the company slowly released it last fall to high-use GrainFox customers. Lepp and his colleagues used those customers’ feedback to improve the chatbot and then released it in late November.

GrainFox offers its service through two subscription plans with an annual cost of $1,500 and $3,000, respectively. Customers can add a Sinoa “intro pack” to their subscription for $19.99.

AI is increasingly shaping how work is performed and how Canadian businesses operate.

KPMG Canada released research in November showing that of 753 business leaders across Canada who were surveyed, 93 per cent said their organizations are using AI in some form — up from 61 per cent in 2024.

Lepp said GrainFox has been bullish on the technology since 2019.

“We’re just focusing on what our customers are telling us, what’s important to them, and trying to make them as much money as possible by just doing a better job,” he said.

GrainFox takes the privacy and security of customers’ data seriously, Lepp said. The company has implemented online-banking level security and is certified by Ag Data Transparent, an authority on farm data privacy/security.

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca