Its SmartFarm app deployed across agribusinesses’ own field agents allows for business-to-business-to-farmer plot-level farm management

CropIn Technology Solutions, an agriculture technology startup based out of Bangalore, has raised INR 58 crore (US$8 million) in a Series B financing round from Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures India) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Strategic Investment Fund (London and Seattle).

With this investment, CropIn’s total funding raised to date has reached US$12 million.

The new financing will help scale CropIn’s ‘SmartFarm’ technology platform in India and globally to expand its reach from three million acres across two million farmers to more than 10 million actively monitored acres across seven million farmers, the company said in a press statement.

SmartFarm is a customisable mobile app and web interface for farm management deployed across agribusinesses’ own field agents allowing for business-to-business-to-farmer plot-level farm management.

With this capital infusion, CropIn will also further develop its Machine Learning-based ‘SmartRisk’ platform to help farmers in plot-level crop detection and yield prediction.

Also Read: This Indian agritech firm helps farmers predict yield and improve sales, thus saving them from bankruptcy and suicides

CropIn was started in 2010 by Kumar (CEO), Kunal Prasad (COO), and Chittaranjan Jena (CTO). The agritech firm’s SaaS-based services enable clients to analyse and interpret data and derive real-time actionable insights on standing crop and projects spanning geographies. It harnesses cutting-edge technologies, such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, geo-tagging, and satellite monitoring to achieve this goal.

At the back end, CropIn’s data lake amplifies this ground-truth data with local weather information and high-resolution satellite imagery, which form the foundation of Machine Learning. It analyses and interprets this data for the 265 crops with nearly 3,500 variants on its platform across billions of data points that grow every day, and detects patterns and predicts the future of the crop highlighting the risk and opportunity for agri stakeholders.

“To feed the 9.7 billion people in the world in 2050, agriculture efficiency must increase by 35 to 70 per cent and technology is the key. India’s rich mix of farming practices and small landholdings provide a massive data set to inform our models. Further, as a SaaS company, geography has never been a limiting factor for expanding our customer base,” said CEO Kumar.

The firm claims to have 180-plus customers  (global agribusinesses, banks, government bodies and development agencies) across 29 countries.

CropIn was a finalist of inaugural Rabobank Food Loss Challenge Asia startup programme.

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