Backed by investors including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the CDC Group, Cropin is set to digitize the agriculture industry. Today, the company announced the launch of Cropin Cloud, a cloud platform with integrated applications. In the year Founded in 2010, Cropin’s other products exist in 92 countries, partnering with 250 B2B customers and digitizing 26 million hectares of farmland. It talks about the largest crop knowledge graph with more than 500 crops and 10,000 crop varieties.
Cropin’s founder and CEO Krishna Kumar told TechCrunch that Cropin’s Cloud was built because the agriculture industry “lacks a unified platform to build different solutions and build different solutions.” Due to climate change, geo-political tensions, food supply chain disruptions and a growing world population.
“The global ag ecosystem is vast in depth and breadth, but surprisingly the tools to capture and share data are sorely lacking,” he added.
Cropin Cloud can be used by agribusinesses of all sizes. It has three sub-platforms that provide access to earth observation, remote sensing and data and machine learning tools to help farmers and other stakeholders in the food value chain better manage crops and harvests.
Cropin management team
The first sub-platform is CropinApps, which covers various use cases: global farm operations management, food safety measures, supply chain visibility, forecasting and risk management, food tracking from farm to table, research and development and production management. It also helps farmers track deforestation and carbon emissions.
The Cropin Data Hub, meanwhile, collects data from a variety of sources for analysis, including field management applications, IoT devices, drones, remote data satellites and weather reports. And finally, CropIntelligence uses the company’s 22 contextual deep learning and AI models to perform tasks such as crop recognition, crop leveling, yield estimation, irrigation scheduling, pest and disease forecasting, nitrogen uptake and harvest date estimation.
Some examples of how Cropin’s technology has been used include Unilever working with coconut farmers to record data on how mature trees were, problems they encountered and productivity levels using the company’s SmartFarm Plus app. The app used that information to provide location-specific recommendations, such as how much coconut sugar farmers could produce.
Additionally, Cropin, a project covering 244 villages, 30,000 farms and 77 crop varieties, has provided insights into climate, crop management, pest and disease forecasting, nutrient management and soil and water management practices for the World Bank and the Government of India. According to Croppin, this resulted in an average increase of 30% in yield and productivity, while farm income increased by about 37%.
Croppin has raised a total of $33 million since its launch 12 years ago. Besides the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Strategic Investment Fund and CDC Group, other investors include ABC World Asia, Chirata Ventures, Ankur Capital, Binnext and Chris Gopalakrishnan Family Office. Kumar said Kropin is now in the process of raising funds for a Series D round, and aims to raise investments in the range of $50 million to $75 million over the next six months.
Headquartered in Bangalore, Kropin has subsidiaries in the United States, Singapore and the Netherlands. Earlier this year, co-founder and COO Kunal Prasad moved to the Netherlands to oversee European operations. Kumar says Kropin’s commitment is $15 million to $25 million in annual recurring revenue, and the company has grown 2.5x in the past few years and expects similar growth this year. “We expect the launch of Cropin Cloud 2023 to be a game changer for Cropin in terms of revenue growth,” Kumar said.
