November 27, 2018

India’s CropIn Technology Solutions (CropIn) announced it has successfully closed on an $8 million Series B round of funding from Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures India) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Investment Fund. This round brings CropIn’s total funding to $12 million to date.

Founded in Bangalore in 2010 by Krishna Kumar, CropIn is the developer of a ground-to-cloud platform that enables those in the agricultural ecosystem to adopt a data-driven approach to production, and to “grow more with less”. Through initiatives touching on digitization, traceability, predictability, sustainability, and compliance, CropIn’s product platform addresses a global digital-based agricultural services market that is estimated to be valued at $4.5 billion by 2020.

With a headquarters Bengaluru, CropIn serves more than 180 customers including many global agribusinesses, banks, government bodies, and development agencies across 29 countries. The company’s debut product – SmartFarm – is a highly customizable mobile app and web interface for farm management enabling business-to-business-to-farmer plot-level farm management. Under its business model, data is collected and curated by agribusiness employees in the field, which is then analyzed for inconsistencies by CropIn to give a clear picture of what is occurring on the ground-level, generating what the company calls “ground-truth” data.

At the back end, CropIn takes this “ground-truth” data and amplifies it through the integration of local weather data and high-resolution satellite imagery. Through analysis and interpretation of this data on 265 crops with nearly 3,500 variants across billions of data points that are increasing every day, CropIn is building out an ag-information highway that will detect patterns and predict the future of a crop’s risk and opportunity for stakeholders, providing near real-time actionable insights to agricultural processors, distributors, lenders, insurers, and input providers.  Through its platform the company also can compile historical crop performance by pixel at farm and regional level.

“We fundamentally believe in the founders’ vision of creating a global agri-tech leader, while partnering with multiple stakeholders including agri-businesses, farming companies, financial lending & insurance companies,” said Karan Mohla, executive director, Chiratae Ventures India Advisors.

Of India’s current population of 1.3 billion, 190.7 million are expected to go hungry every day, as crop yields are lower than those seen in the U.S., China, and Europe. And although China has less arable land and 40 percent less available water, agricultural output is nearly double that of India. Compounding the difficulties, climate change and shifting weather patterns, which have already been considered contributing factors in the suicides of 60,000 Indian farmers over the past 30 years, are only becoming more challenging.

Amid this landscape, agtech is increasingly being seen as a solution to transform India’s agricultural sector into one that is able to meet the demands of the coming decades.

“The sheer impact of CropIn for their global customers across 29 countries based on the unique data sets captured by the platform is staggering. The potential to revolutionize agriculture leveraging technology and machine learning has never been greater, and we believe Krishna and Kunal will continue to pioneer this industry for years ahead.”

~ Lynda Kiernan