I've been thinking about this since I was 8 years old. Back then, I just wanted to help my mother water her plants better. I didn't know that thought would follow me for the next 20 years.
Leaf AI isn't a startup. It's not a product. It's not a pitch deck.
It's a question I've been trying to answer my whole life:
"How do we give people better tools to grow food — without making them dependent on something they can't control?"
Everything you see here, I built alone.
Not because I had to — but because growing food is something I've been passionate about since I was a child. That passion never left. It just kept finding new layers to explore.
I think in systems. I design for modularity. And I believe that software should be both intelligent and intuitive — powerful enough to handle complexity, simple enough that it never gets in your way.
If something needs a manual, it's not finished yet.
The next step is one I care deeply about: bringing Leaf AI fully offline. Your system. Your data. Your hardware. Running locally — without depending on anyone else's infrastructure.
It's not the only answer. But for me, it's the honest one.
I've turned down investors. I've rebuilt everything from scratch. More than once.
Leaf AI is a real company — with professional manufacturing in Asia that I visit regularly to make sure German quality standards are actually met, not just assumed. But the direction is mine. Every product, every line of firmware, every design decision traces back to one place: my lab. That's where I spend most of my time, and where I'm most at home — developing new hardware and software with the same obsession I've had since I was eight.
That's why Leaf AI is becoming open source. Not because it's trendy. Because it's the only honest answer to the question I started with.
Your data. Your hardware. Your system.
Nobody should own that except you.
— Manuel