Way back in 2010, when agtech was a relatively alien term, India had only about a dozen startups in this segment. Bangalore-based Cropin was one among those early agtech companies in the sector. A decade down the line, amidst over 1000 agtech startups, Cropin still remains the cream of the crop in the agtech space.
Founded by two childhood friends Krishna Kumar and Kunal Prasad, the Bangalore-based company indeed had very humble beginnings. As agtech is all set to take centre stage, Cropin has traversed a long way to truly become a name to be reckoned with.
This B2B player has digitized over 16 million acres of farmland, empowering over 7 million farmers (most of whom are smallholder farmers) to unlock the power of data and AI. Cropin Cloud, which the company says is the world’s first industry cloud for agriculture, provides predictive intelligence for over 200 million acres of farmland worldwide. Its investors include names like Google, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, JSR Corporation and ABC Impact among others.
CIO Dimension caught up with Sujit Janardanan, Chief Customer & Marketing Officer of Cropin, to talk about Cropin’s story, its vision and the way forward.
Watch the full interview here:
Much of the company’s growth, says Sujit, can be attributed to its conscious decision to pivot away from being a point-solution provider to an ecosystem player. “Our vision is to be the backbone of the agriculture ecosystem, similar to how SWIFT is for the banking ecosystem or Amadeus for the flight booking ecosystem,” he adds.
Cropin Cloud is a big leap in that direction. This platform envisions to bring in various stakeholders in the agricultural ecosystem – including startups who build agtech solutions and help them co-innovate. “This enables us to collectively unlock the value faster and deliver impact to businesses and farmers as soon as possible,” says Sujit. While Cropin has already helped seven million farmers, globally there are over 500 million farmers who can potentially benefit from technology. Therefore, speed is the need of the hour for the agriculture sector. “With Cropin Cloud, we are trying to help everyone move faster,” Sujit highlights.
In this interview, he also touches upon Cropin’s plot-level predictive intelligence capabilities and forecasting models.
Sujit, who previously led marketing at Google, AWS and NTT, will be talking at the upcoming COP28 Dubai about ‘Digital Innovations for climate-resilient agriculture’.
