CropIn, a leading global artificial intelligence and data-led agri-tech organisation empowering stakeholders to reimagine agriculture with data, has raised US$ 20 million in a Series C funding round led by ABC World Asia, an Asia-focused private equity fund dedicated to evidence-based impact investing.
Existing investors Chiratae Ventures, Invested Development and Ankur Capital also participated in this funding round. Other new investors in this round include CDC Group and Kris Gopalakrishnan’s family office Pratithi Investment Trust.
CropIn will use this capital infusion to focus on its global expansion, while continuing to innovate on its machine learning-based predictive analytics platform, SmartRisk to further strengthen its artificial intelligence capabilities. CropIn is also investing to penetrate deeper in its target markets globally. Recently, CropIn opened an Amsterdam office, and will be hiring local leaders to drive growth in the European market.
CropIn’s data-driven farming solutions enable agri-enterprises and growers to ‘maximize per-acre value’. Its farm data and agronomy management platform, SmartFarm, empowers stakeholders to improve efficiency, productivity, predictability, and sustainability of their crop value-chains. SmartFarm enables agri-enterprises to adhere to food safety standards thereby ensuring farm-to-fork traceability. The platform helps growers adopt sustainable farming practices to build long term economic viability and resiliency for local farming communities. CropIn has partnered with several global players in agriculture, including development finance institutions and government entities in 52 countries, to drive their digital and sustainability goals.
CropIn’s SmartRisk platform improves underwriting and risk assessment, enabling banks, insurance providers and other financial institutions to make informed underwriting decisions, identify new markets and expand product portfolios to service high-volume low-ticket opportunities. By analysing and interpreting farm-centric data for over 388 crops with nearly 9,500 variants across trillions of data points that grow every day, SmartRisk helps achieve high prediction accuracy at a plot-level. It does this by combining computer vision with deep-learning algorithms, on multispectral imagery derived from aerial scouting (satellites and drones), field scouting data, and hyperlocal weather.
The SmartRisk AI has processed more than 160 million hectares of land area, and has the potential to impact 70 million farmers globally in the next 3-5 years. Thus far, CropIn has positively impacted 13 million acres and 4 million farmers through the SmartFarm and SmartRisk platforms. Smallholder farmers associated with CropIn’s clientele also observed their crop yields increasing by nearly 25 percent in the first year and subsequently experienced optimised yield improvements in the following years, by integrating the recommended advanced agricultural techniques and quality inputs into their farming practices through CropIn’s agri-tech platforms.
“The robust, predictive power of digitalisation offers tremendous potential for the agriculture industry to leapfrog its many challenges in the coming years. The industry is capturing more data than ever, on everything from agronomy, weather and logistics to market price volatility, which has helped reduce acute data gaps throughout the value chain. In order to improve yields, optimise production and improve resilience and sustainability, agri-businesses are increasingly relying on innovative agri-tech solutions like artificial intelligence, data analytics, and the internet of things. We, at CropIn, are excited to advance the ‘AI-Culture’ for Agriculture,” says Krishna Kumar, Founder and CEO of CropIn.