5 Things we Learned from our Interview with CropIn Technology
by Dr Vijayender Nalla, founder of Agribusiness Academy.
The Agri-tech industry in India is receiving significant interest from investors, encouraging tech entrepreneurs to develop solutions within this space. This snapshot from Agfunder shows the total Indian agri-tech investments to the period ending 2017.
While you can see considerable investment into the food value chain, the attention on the upstream side is considerably less (only 10% of the total investment dollars). Upstream (closer to the farmer) is what drives the entire value chain and where digitization is relatively poor; we see a lot of potential for tech businesses operating in this space.
CropIn Technology has been one of the pioneers operating within Agri-Tech since 2010. Their core focus is on increasing the per acre value at farms through digitizing the farms and their operations benefitting the entire value chain.
From our recent Podcast interview with CropIn CEO, Mr. Krishna Kumar, we have picked 5 lessons.
1. Stay true to your core purpose. Building your products and business model around it offers value.
Below is the presentation of CropIn journey.
From our discussion, the key highlights in the journey are pivoting to a B2B (business-to-business) SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) company early on, and innovating products for the entire value chain in recent years.
However, in this business model and product innovation evolution, their core has remained constant; focus on increasing the per acre value of the farm. This focus enabled them to develop significant farm level data and understanding in a bottom-up manner, giving them the edge and their much deserved scale.
2. A focus on Digitizing Farms offers a lot of scope for innovation.
Once CropIn got its revenue model right for digitizing farms, it managed to gain scale in its core mandate of increasing the per acre value of the farm.
This has enabled the company to gain good data points for a wide variety of crop breeds growing in different geographic regions. This bottom-up data enabled them to leverage other technology developments, such as machine learning and remote sensing, to strengthen its core products to support other farm decisions. They have gone on to build several innovative products which serve the needs of the entire value chain. The figure demonstrates the capabilities of CropIn core product smartfarm.
3. Develop a strong core product which offers meaningful and profitable product extensions.
The bottom-up data capabilities used in smartfarm has not only strengthened that product but also enabled several product extensions for other players along the value chain (figure below).
For example, smartrisk creates added value to other value chain players that have interest in monitoring the production data at the farm in real-time and get a predictive analysis of the output during that seasons. Such data has tremendous value for insurance providers, lenders, aggregators and commodity traders before and during a crop production cycle. Agri-input companies (that sell seeds, fertilizers etc.) can objectively understand the performance of their products understand different operating conditions, thus directing their future research and development activities in the right direction.
CropIn’s solution, smartsales is designed to work as a CRM (customer relationship management) system for agri-input companies to manage their dealer networks relationships and business transaction in real-time. mwarehouse, on the other hand, is created to add value to factors such as traceability and inventory management for aggregators and commodity traders.
4. Team alignment to the Founder’s ambition decides the Growth/scale.
After their first financing round, CropIn have experienced the challenges in growing the team capable of sharing the passion and scaling the business ambitions. This has disturbed several of their initial plans and potentially delayed some of their scaling ambitions.
It is critical to have a strategic plan to grow the team and develop talent on a continuous basis on staying relevant to the customer needs. Forging the right partnerships that can help provide domain expertise and scale team capabilities can take an Agri-Tech start-up time, but is crucial for scaling effectively.
Developing the right products, growth in business, brand reputation and attracting growth capital are all a result of the talent within an organisation.
5. Technology capabilities should be matched with appropriate domain expertise to realize exponential growth.
Having a technology and product focus culture within an organization can easily increase the gap between the agri-tech business and the agribusiness they wish to serve.
The only way to avoid this trap is to stay closely connected with domain expertise and build a culture of working like a smart agribusiness rather than like a technology company. Exponential growth can be achieved when the domain expertise is matched with the right technology tools, not the other way around.
A domain expertise partnership that can match the international ambition of the agri-tech business is super critical in realizing exponential growth
If these insights resonated with the approach of your ambitious agri-tech business and would like to build an academy that can deliver domain expertise and team scaling capabilities beyond borders you can reach out to discuss your interests with us at https://agribusiness.academy
You can listen to the full podcast interview here.
