Bengaluru – Dutch Uncles

How CropIn Is Addressing Challenges Of India’s Agriculture Industry?

Naina Sood — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 02:35:03 +0000

What can technology do in agriculture? Imagine a grower/farmer having the ability to know exactly what, when and how he should grow to maximise yield; a bank/insurance company knowing whom to lend, how much to lend without worrying about risks; a food processing company having real time monitoring of the production, warehousing, inventory, team, etc. It all boils down to making every stakeholder’s life easy with better management and well informed decisions, bringing high efficiency and profits. That is the power of data-driven innovation which is being brought in by Agritech start-up CropIn.

This Bengaluru-based start up, which was founded in 2010, has developed 4 solutions- SmartFarm, SmartRisk, SmartWare and SmartSales – to ‘Digitise the farm’.

CropIn: The Farmer’s Alexa

Since years, farmers have been facing the challenge of climatic vagaries, soil degradation, pest infestation and diseases, non predictability of the production, etc. To address these problems, CropIn came up with SmartFarm, which has the ability to provide precise advice, using Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, geo-tagging and satellite monitoring, to the farmer based on his growing condition and the crops he has set. For instance, if there is a frost attack, the farmer gets advice on how to take action. The tool is capable of even detecting a crop and giving its yield and harvest time frame.

Empowering Governments and Banks to Support Farmers

Majority of government schemes are unable to reach the right person or fail to cater to the precise needs of the beneficiary. CropIn’s platform empowers government entities to remotely monitor the progress of the farmers and to design and implement schemes or programs that can further enhance their livelihoods.

Similarly, banks are able to make better decisions as the solution provides complete information about the farmer and his quality of output. SmartRisk enables lending institutions to validate the information furnished by farmers by comparing it with historical and predictive insights gleaned from a combination of data from multiple sources. This allows banks to underwrite loans and process credit to those farmers who display high assurance of loan repayment.

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This Bengaluru-based start-up, which was founded in 2010, has developed 4 solutions- SmartFarm, SmartRisk, SmartWare and SmartSales - to ‘Digitise the farm’.

Streamlining Operations

On the B2B side, CropIn’s app allows farming companies to manage hundreds of farmers and production using a mobile based real-time application. Besides using remote sensing data, the company has around 30,000 extension workers who are engaged in day-to-day visits of the farms, registration, crop monitoring, land survey, etc.

What’s in it for me?

The biggest learning for a small business here is to understand ground issues and develop solutions for the same. The idea of providing SaaS-based services to agribusinesses came to Krishna Kumar, Founder, CropIn, after observing the agrarian crisis in Karnataka in 2010. With time, a simple solution was built over machine learning and AI. Since there is a huge information gap at different levels of the agri-ecosystem, start-ups must focus on building a solution that would cater to the entire value chain. Understanding through CropIn’s initiative of extension workers, it is needless to say that one of the most important responsibilities is to stay attune to the ground realities in this sector.

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How Bengaluru Became India’s Start-up Hub

Naina Sood — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 06:35:04 +0000

From being the IT capital of India to the world’s fastest-growing tech hub, Bengaluru wears several feathers in its cap. Popularly known as the Silicon Valley of Asia, Bengaluru has been a womb to some of the biggest start-ups in the country. Starting its journey as an IT hub, Bengaluru today is India’s unicorn capital giving birth to as many as eight unicorns out of total 21 in India.

Why do unicorns grow in Bengaluru?

Why is Bengaluru the first choice of an entrepreneur? The answer is simple: Because that’s where the nurturing ecosystem is. You discover talent, connect with investors, hire from multinational R&D centres and large IT service companies and learn from peer start-ups. All this makes Bangalore India’s most attractive city for leading start-ups.

All the eight unicorns that emerged from Bengaluru, including Flipkart, Byju’s, Ola, Swiggy, Bigbasket and Udaan, took advantage of its IT ecosystem and flared.

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Starting its journey as an IT hub, Bengaluru today is India’s unicorn capital giving birth to as many as eight unicorns out of total 21 in India.

The Evolution of Startup Ecosystem in Bengaluru

Everyone wants to be at the place where action is, and that is Bengaluru in India. Bengaluru started up early as the city evolved as a hub for public sector industries with manufacturing giants like The Hindustan Aeronautics and Bharat Heavy Electronics, placing their headquarters in Bengaluru. Because of this concentration of technical and scientific manpower, the city witnessed the IT revolution in the early 2000. The benefits of its infrastructure and abundance of resources caused a snowball effect with global titans like Amazon and Uber following the suit and placing their headquarters in the city.

As it started hosting some of the biggest R&D centres in the country, educational institutions played a vital role giving rise to tech expertise. Then came the boom of start-ups with the ‘Start-up India’ initiative in 2016, which was indeed a game changer, coupled with Make in India, Karnataka Startup Policy and Digital India. That year alone, there were 2,34,000 start-up registrations and rest is history.

As majority of the start-ups are technology-based, Bengaluru served the best in the class with emergence of startups across industries such as fintech, edtech and healthtech start-ups. Venture Capital investment, both Indian and foreign, soared in the city and has been rising since then. Apart from ideas, talent (home to some of the most coveted universities), investments, Bengaluru is rife with accelerators and incubators to aid entrepreneurs. Initiatives like Microsoft Accelerator, 10,000 startups by Nasscom, TLabs, Walmart Labs and partnerships with corporates have ensured that Bengaluru’s ecosystem remains conducive to start-up business development.

Contribution to India’s Unicorn List

The city contributes to India’s unicorn list by adding unicorns worth $29 billion in total, while Gurugram and Noida contribute by $19 billion each with a total six and two unicorns, respectively.

The Bengaluru startup ecosystem has seen the launch of over 11,000 start-ups and has managed to attract a total venture capital inflow worth $28 billion (between 2014 and first half of 2020), the highest among any other start-up hub in India. It is home to India’s first billion-dollar-plus start-up and continues to dominate the Indian start-up ecosystem in terms of facilitating innovative start-ups in tech-intensive fields such as AI/ML, E-mobility, IoT and others.

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