By Lynda Kiernan
India’s Intello Labs announced it has raised $5.9 million through a Series A led by new investor Saama Capital. Other participating new investors include Singapore-based agtech accelerator GROW, and U.S.-based SVG Ventures THRIVE, along with returning investors Omnivore Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners.
This funding follows a $2 million Seed round raised from Omnivore Partners and Nexus Venture Partners in April 2019, and brings total capital raised to-date to $8.3 million.
Founded in Gurugram in 2016 by Milan Sharma, Nishant Mishra, Himani Shah, and Devendra Chandani, and alumni of the Indigram Labs and JioGenNext accelerators, Intello Labs brings together artificial intelligence, vision technology, and deep learning to build a platform that can assess and monitor the quality of fresh produce and agricultural commodities along the entire value chain.
“There is a rapid and growing need for better and faster quality assessment of fresh produce across the value chain, to improve the end consumers’ experience and to minimize the already high losses through wastage,” said Kiranbir Nag, partner, Saama Capital.
Intello Labs provides a visual solution that surpasses the widespread manual inspections carried out today. The startup’s smartphone platform uses a photo of the commodity in question to instantly determine quality using computer vision and AI metrics based on color, size, and visual defects.
Delivered through a smartphone app, this visualization-based solution is designed to increase standardization, and to increase transparency to food quality assurance, while reducing risk. This is accomplished through four platforms:
Intello Track – the mobile app that determines quality along the supply chain.
Intello Sort – a sorting machine that divides fresh produce based on quality.
Intello Pack – a quality monitoring system for fruit and vegetables immediately before being dispatched to customers.
And Intello Deep – a handheld scanner that identifies moisture, pesticide residues, and dry matter.
Having this ability to objectively measure and grade the quality of food and crops will translate into higher prices for farmers when dealing with traders, who typically make offers with discounts built-in given the assumption of quality issues.
Existing clients include produce growers, packers, aggregators, exporters, processors, food service entities, and retailers including Reliance Fresh, Dole, Ocean Spray, and many leading e-commerce platforms across China and Southeast Asia.
“Intello’s scalable and non-destructive AI based digital suite of solutions is well placed to become an industry standard tool especially for the large buyers of and traders in fresh produce,” said Nag. “The team has demonstrated this through its marquee and growing global customer base. We are excited to partner with the team for their next phase of growth.”
Currently Intello Labs is rapidly expanding across India, but is also pursuing other leading global markets like the U.S., China, and Southeast Asia.
“This funding will help us accelerate growth in international markets, specifically the U.S. and across Asia Pacific,” said Milan Sharma, co-founder and CEO, Intello Labs. “There has been a significant spike in interest from these markets over the past few months, which was further accelerated by COVID-19, and now we have the firepower to go after these opportunities. This new demand, combined with the stickiness of our existing clients, validates the fact that our products bring much-needed transparency and standardization to fresh produce value chains.”
– Lynda Kiernan is Editor with GAI Media and daily contributor to the GAI News and Agtech Intel platforms. If you would like to submit a contribution for consideration, please contact Ms. Kiernan at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.