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World’s first purpose-built industry cloud for agriculture backed by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is here

Cropin

Cropin, committed to digitising the agricultural industry and backed by investors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the CDC Group is a cloud platform with integrated apps, was launched today by the company. Cropin’s other products are available in 92 countries, it has over 250 B2B customers, and it has digitised 26M acres of farmland. It claims to have the world’s largest crop knowledge graph, which includes over 500 crops and 10,000 crop varieties.

Cropin Cloud

Cropin Cloud is suitable for agribusinesses of all sizes. It has three sub-platforms that provide farmers and other food value chain stakeholders with tools for earth observation, remote sensing, data, and machine learning to help them better manage crops and harvests.

Cropin Apps is the first sub-platform, and it covers a wide range of use cases, including global farming operations management, food safety measures, supply chain visibility, predictability, and risk management, tracing food from farm to table, R&D, and production management. It also assists farmers in monitoring deforestation and carbon emissions.

Tech at play

Meanwhile, Cropin Data Hub collects and analyses data from a variety of sources, including on-field farm management apps, IoT devices, drones, remote sensing satellites, and weather reports. Cropin Intelligence, meanwhile, employs the company’s 22 contextual deep-learning and AI models to assist agribusinesses with data points such as crop detection, crop stage identification, yield estimates, irrigation scheduling, pest and disease prediction, nitrogen uptake, and harvest date estimation.

Unilever’s work with coconut farmers who used the company’s SmartFarm Plus app to record information about how mature trees were, issues they were facing, and productivity levels is one example of how Cropin’s technology has been used. The data was then used by the app to provide location-specific advice, such as how much coconut sugar farmers could expect to produce.

Cropin also provided information to the World Bank and the Government of India on weather, crop management, pest and disease forecasts, nutrient management, and soil and water management practises in a project that included 244 villages, 30,000 farm plots, and 77 crop varieties. Cropin claims that this resulted in a 30% increase in average yield and productivity, as well as a 37% increase in farm revenue.

Commenting on the launch, Krishna Kumar, Founder & CEO, Cropin, said, “Today, the global agriculture ecosystem is facing large disruptions triggered by climate change, geo-political tensions, food supply-chain challenges, and an ever-increasing global population. Solving these challenges demands a technology platform that enables the ecosystem players to transform their business operations. Cropin Cloud leverages the advancements in cloud computing, earth observation, remote sensing, data and machine learning algorithms to help the agriculture sector unlock new possibilities. For Cropin, this is an important milestone as we double down on our core purpose to maximize per acre value for every stakeholder in the global agriculture ecosystem.” 

Vijay Nelson, Chief Product Officer, Cropin, said, “Cropin Cloud is the world’s very first intelligent cloud platform for agriculture. Agriculture technology is complex and needs specialized expertise in multiple areas like GIS, agri-science, AI/ML models, weather data, and IoT, among others. Crops are copiously diversified, and the digital solutions required to monitor them need hyper-tuning. Cropin Cloud combines the power of a diverse set of advanced technologies, agronomy knowledge, data science and artificial intelligence. The platform offers a complete set of agriculture-specific capabilities to accelerate business growth and bring about rapid and far-reaching digital transformation in the agri-ecosystem.”

The Bengaluru-based tech company has raised a total of $33M since its inception 12 years ago. Its investors include ABC World Asia, Chiratae Ventures, Ankur Capital, Beenext, and Kris Gopalakrishnan’s family office, in addition to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Strategic Investment Fund and CDC Group. Further, Cropin is currently fundraising for its Series D round, with a goal of raising $50M to $75M in the next six months.

Cropin, which is headquartered in Bangalore, has subsidiaries in the United States, Singapore, and the Netherlands. Kunal Prasad, co-founder and COO, relocated to the Netherlands earlier this year to oversee European operations. Cropin’s committed annual recurring revenue is $15M to $25M, according to Kumar, and the company has grown 2.5x in the last few years and expects to grow similarly this year.

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