Agritech Cropin launches its cloud platform to digitize the agricultural industry

Backed by investors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the CDC Group, Cropin is committed to digitizing the agricultural industry. Today the company announced the launch of Cropin Cloud, a cloud platform with integrated applications. Founded in 2010, Cropin's other products are present in 92 countries, it partners with over 250 B2B customers and has digitized 26 million acres of farmland. It boasts the largest crop knowledge graph in the world with over 500 crops and 10,000 crop varieties.

Krishna Kumar, founder and CEO of Cropin, told TechCrunch that Cropin Cloud was developed because the agriculture industry lacks access to a "unified and cohesive platform that can enable and help create a wide variety of solutions,” even as it faces disruption from climate change, geopolitical tensions, food supply chain disruptions and a growing global population.

"The global agricultural ecosystem is gigantic in depth and scale, but strangely the tools to capture and share data consistently are sorely lacking," he added.

Cropin Cloud can be used by food businesses of all sizes. It has three sub-platforms that allow farmers and other actors in the food value chain to access Earth observation, remote sensing, data and machine learning tools to help them better manage crops and harvests.

The Cropin Leadership Team

The first sub-platform is Cropin Apps, which covers a wide range of use cases: management of global agricultural operations, food safety measures, supply chain visibility, predictability and risk management, traceability of farm-to-table foods, research and development, and production management. It also helps farmers track deforestation and carbon emissions.

Cropin Data Hub, on the other hand, brings together data from a variety of sources for analysis, including field farm management apps, IoT devices, drones, remote sensing satellites, and weather reports . And finally, Cropin Intelligence uses the company's 22 contextual deep learning and artificial intelligence models to help agribusinesses with data points such as crop detection, crop stage identification, yield estimates, irrigation scheduling, pest and disease prediction, nitrogen uptake and harvest date estimation.

Some examples of how Cropin's technology has been used include Unilever's work with coconut farmers who used the company's SmartFarm Plus app to record tree maturity information , the problems they faced and the levels of productivity. The app then used this data to provide location-specific guidance, such as how much coconut sugar coconut sugar producers were likely to produce.

Cropin has also provided information on weather, crop management, pest and disease forecasting, nutrient management, and soil and water management practices to the World Bank and government India as part of a project covering 244 villages, 30,000 agricultural plots and 77 crop varieties. . Cropin claims this resulted in an average 30% increase in yield and productivity, with an almost 37% increase in farm income.

Since its launch 12 years ago, Cropin has raised a total of $33 million. Besides the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Strategic Investment Fund and CDC Group, its other investors include ABC World Asia, Chiratae Ventures, Ankur Capital, Beenext and the family office of Kris Gopalakrishnan. Kumar said Cropin is now raising funds for its Series D round and aims to increase investments in the range of $50-75 million over the next six months.

Located in Bangalore, Cropin has subsidiaries...