Cropin’s agriculture industry cloud to provide apps, data frameworks

Cropin, an agritech startup backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, on Tuesday said that it was launching its industry cloud for agriculture, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Dubbed Cropin Cloud, the suite comes with the ability to ingest and process data, run machine learning models for quick analysis and decision making, and several applications specific to the industry’s needs.

The company claims that the cloud suite, which is built on a knowledge base of more than 500 crops and 10,000 crop varieties across 92 nations, will solve planet-scale challenges such as food security and climate-related issues, while reducing the environmental impact of farming.

The suite, according to the company, consists of three layers: Cropin Apps, the Cropin Data Hub and Cropin Intelligence.

Cropin Apps, as the name suggests, comprises applications that support global farming operations management, food safety measures, supply chain and “farm to fork” visibility, predictability and risk management, farmer enablement and engagement, advance seed R&D, production management, and multigenerational seed traceability.

These applications can also aid nutrition management as well as deforestation and carbon-emissions management, and help farmers adopt regenerative agriculture and climate-safe practices, the company said.

The second layer, Data Hub, can ingest data from a variety of sources including on-farm devices, drones, IoT devices and satellites. Agriculture businesses and farmers can use the hub to access structured and contextualized data from various sources for correlation and analysis at scale, the company said.

Cropin Data Hub also has prebuilt data frameworks designed to solve the most challenging problems, such as cloud-free satellite imagery, boundary detection of farm plots, and segmentation of land use, Cropin said. 

The third layer, Cropin Intelligence, uses the company’s 22 prebuilt AI and deep-learning models to provide insights about crop detection, crop stage identification, yield estimation, irrigation scheduling, pest and disease prediction, nitrogen uptake, water stress detection, harvest date estimation, and change detection, among others.

The company claims to have deployed such predictive maintenance or analysis across 200 million acres of land globally.

Bengalaru-based Cropin, which was founded in 2010 by Krishna Kumar, Kunal Prasad and Chittaranjan Jena, claims to have raised around $33 million to date from 12 investors such as ABC World Asia, BEENEXT, Invested Development and Sophia Investment APs among others. 

The company says it has partnered with more than 250 B2B customers.

There are other startups across the world that offer solutions and services similar to Cropin, including:

• New Zealand-based startup Onfarm Data, which was founded in 2017, offers a cloud-based platform for farmers to control, monitor, and manage irrigation systems remotely.
• Founded in 2016, Malaysian startup Agritix offers a plantation workforce management solution, dubbed Agritix Workforce.
• Another startup, founded in 2018 in the UK under the name Glas Data, provides a cloud-based agriculture analysis platform that can aggregate data from various sources in the farm and provide insights in the form of dashboard visualizations.
• Norwegian startup Dynaspace, also founded in 2018, offers a platform called InsightSphere, that uses satellite imagery to provide a map of agriculture operations.
• In the US, Aggio, founded in 2016, offers a cloud-based sales and market-intelligence platform.

The global farm management software market is projected to reach $1.9 billion by 2028, from $921.4 million in 2021, a Valuates report showed. It also shows that the growth will be driven by factors such as growing awareness and increasing implementation of cloud computing in real-time farm data management, growing population, and a subsequent rise in demand for food worldwide.