Cropin looks to cater to agri sector’s growing digitisation and predictive intelligence demands

Excerpts from an interview with Kumaar:

Q: How can cloud help in the agriculture space? How different is your solution from other cloud-based solutions in the industry?

Kumaar: Cropin Cloud is the world’s first purpose-built industry cloud for agriculture. Most solutions in this space are focused on providing point solutions for a region, or crop-specific problems. However, Cropin Cloud offers a complete set of agriculture-specific capabilities to accelerate business growth and drive digital transformation across the agri-ecosystem at a global scale. It is designed as three layers that include an integrated platform of applications for digitisation, clean and contextual data pipelines for enhanced decision-making based on data analytics, and globally proven crop-specific, crop- and geography-agnostic machine learning models to enable organisations with predictive intelligence.

Cropin Apps, the application layer helps agri and allied industry players, including forestry, commodity, banking, and insurance companies, with a range of offerings to enable global farming operations management, food safety measures, supply chain visibility, predictability and risk management, farm-to-fork traceability, farmer enablement, and engagement, among many others.

The Cropin Data Hub offers our customers an interface with multiple agri-data sources—on-field farm management apps, internet-of-things devices, drones, mechanisation data from farming resources, satellite imagery and weather data. It helps agribusiness access structured and contextualised data from various sources for correlation and data analytics at scale. The third layer, Cropin Intelligence, is designed to make advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning have a far-reaching impact on one of the least digitised industries worldwide.

Cropin’s 22 contextual deep-learning AI models help agribusinesses with intelligence around crop detection, crop stage identification, yield estimation, irrigation scheduling, pest and disease prediction, nitrogen uptake, water stress detection, and harvest date estimation, among others.

With this industry-first platform, we are looking to accelerate technology adoption to solve real-world agricultural problems and deliver value to every stakeholder in the food value chain, from the farmer and agribusinesses to the consumer. For Cropin, this is a critical pivot in our journey, and the global agriculture industry will immensely benefit from this innovation.

Q: What are the main domains you see this solution helping in?

Kumaar: Our business operations are primarily divided into three segments: governments, development agencies and enterprise/ private sector. Governments work with Cropin to transform the agriculture ecosystem at scale by implementing digitisation and predictive intelligence solutions. To give you an example, we work with the central government to power one of its flagship initiatives, Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana.

Our AI models empowered the government in achieving the goal of rolling out a nationwide crop insurance scheme. In Nigeria, we have helped policymakers to put in place a programme—national and systematic data collection on where and how wheat is grown—across the country and manage domestic food security.

On the other hand, development agencies such as the World Bank leverage Cropin solutions to help smallholder farmers digitise their farm operations, thereby helping farmers improve yield quality, implement climate-smart agriculture practices, boost profitability, and enable hassle-free financing for themselves. The third category, the enterprise segment, is a critical growth area for us.

Our ecosystem platform helps the entire agri-food stakeholders, including consumer packaged goods players, farming companies, seed manufacturers, food processing companies, agri-input providers, agri lenders and insurers, to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives and enable sustainable livelihoods

Q: Do you have any solutions to improve access to the market or to finance by farmers through the cloud?

Kumaar: Agritech is a critical enabler in driving financial inclusion and enabling finance access in developing markets. The lending ecosystem for rural financing in developing markets is still evolving, as small and medium farmers still depend on the unorganised sector for their loan requirements.

On the other hand, lending institutions are still struggling to build a robust credit assessment framework for these farmers, as minimal data points are available to assess their creditworthiness.

In this context, agritech interventions create a win-win situation for both the farming community and financial institutions.

By adopting digital tools, farmers can increase productivity and profitability, eliminate inefficiencies in the supply chain, provide better visibility and transparency in farming operations, and use predictive intelligence tools to improve yields, all of which are helping the farming community to increase income and creditworthiness and access credit and crop insurance from institutions. It is also a critical business enabler for banks and financial institutions.

Technology is aiding them to estimate crop health, growth and yield in real-time and have access to historical production data, thus helping them to assess the opportunity and risk associated with a farmer or plot. Agritech is now a key enabler for assessing a farmer’s creditworthiness and driving financial inclusion.

For Cropin, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) is a key growth domain, and our solutions on Cropin Cloud are custom-engineered to help the ecosystem address the pain points and bridge the finance-access divide.

Q: The cloud can give rise to a lot of data which can help in extension services. Do you have any solutions for that and how widely are you using it?

Kumaar: We are a B2B solution provider, and all the data collected and aggregated on our platform belongs to the organisations we work with. Cropin doesn’t use any of the data for building solutions. However, Cropin Cloud supports organisations to plug in data from their existing digital tools (the platform can integrate with multiple vendor applications and platforms) and apps to the Cropin Data Hub and structure agri-data at scale.

Users can leverage Cropin Data Hub APIs to share and structure internet of things and farm mechanisation data. It helps them derive field insights and remote intelligence together and make better data-driven decisions.

The Cropin Intelligence platform combines structured field data from the Data Hub, the IoT and mechanisation data from the field, and remote sensing satellite and weather data of the respective fields.

These together power Cropin’s artificial intelligence or machine learning models to provide predictive agri-intelligence. Cropin Cloud also enables customers to easily integrate with other solutions like marketplaces and farm equipment to solve specific use cases.

Q: Brief us about the operations of the company and the road ahead with the grant.

Kumaar: As mentioned before, we are a digital transformation enabler of the agri-food sector. Our solutions help the stakeholders in the agricultural ecosystem make informed decisions that increase farming efficiency, improve productivity, manage risk and environmental changes, and enhance sustainability. Over the years, we have worked with more than 250 B2B customers and have digitised 16 million acres of farmland, benefiting over 7 million farmers.

Our innovations in the last 12 years have played a crucial role in shaping a global agri-intelligence movement, with a crop knowledge graph of over 500 crops and 10,000 crop varieties in 92 countries. Cropin Cloud’s intelligence platform has already provided predictive intelligence for over 200 million acres of farmland worldwide.

With this funding round, we are looking to further invest in our go-to-market efforts and expand the platform’s capabilities, including in developing next-generation predictive intelligence solutions through Cropin AI Labs. It will also help us increase the adoption of Cropin Cloud, to cater to the growing demand for digitisation and predictive intelligence in the global agriculture sector.

We plan to expand the business operations in new regions and industries, focusing on creating solutions that promote sustainable agriculture practices and address global food security challenges on a large scale.