BANGALORE, India - (BUSINESS WIRE) - CropIn in ABC World Asia C financing round lead investor's raised $ 20 million. CropIn is the world's leading artificial intelligence and data-driven agricultural technology organization, committed to reimagining agriculture by empowering stakeholders to use data. ABC World Asia is a private equity fund focused on the Asian market, committed to fact-based impact investment.
Existing investors Chiratae Ventures, Invested Development and Ankur Capital also participated in this round of financing. Other new investors participating in this round of financing include CDC Group and Pratithi Investment Trust, Kris Gopalakrishnan's family office.
CropIn will use the funds to focus on the company's global expansion, while continuing to innovate on its machine learning-based predictive analytics platform SmartRisk to further improve its artificial intelligence capabilities. CropIn will further penetrate into its global target market through investment. Recently, CropIn opened an Amsterdam office and will hire local leaders to promote the growth of its European business.
CropIn's data-driven farming solutions will allow agricultural companies and growers to "maximize their value per acre." Its farm data and agricultural economic management platform SmartFarm can empower stakeholders to improve the efficiency, productivity, predictability and sustainability of its crop value chain. SmartFarm can enable agricultural companies to comply with food safety standards and thereby ensure traceability from farm to table. The platform can help growers adopt sustainable farming practices to build long-term economic viability and resilience for local farming communities. CropIn has cooperated with a number of international players in the agricultural sector, including development financing institutions and government entities in 52 countries, to promote its digitalization and sustainability goals.
CropIn’s SmartRisk platform can improve underwriting and risk assessment, allowing banks, insurance providers, and other financial institutions to make informed underwriting decisions, discover new markets, and expand product portfolios, thereby serving a large number of low-cost opportunities. By analyzing and interpreting farm-focused data, SmartRisk will help achieve high prediction accuracy at the small plot level. These data involve more than 388 crops, covering nearly 9,500 variables spanning trillions of data points, and these data points are growing every day. In order to achieve this, SmartRisk integrates multispectral imaging computer vision derived from aerial detection (satellites and drones), field detection data, and hyperlocalized weather data with deep learning algorithms.
SmartRisk artificial intelligence has processed more than 160 million hectares of land, and is expected to benefit nearly 70 million farmers worldwide in the next 3-5 years. So far, CropIn has brought a positive impact to 13 million acres and 4 million farmers through the SmartFarm and SmartRisk platforms. Small farmers associated with CropIn customers also found that after using CropIn’s agricultural technology platform to integrate recommended advanced agricultural technology and high-quality information with their farming practices, their crop yields in the first year increased by nearly 25%, and that in subsequent years The annual output improvement has also been further optimized.
Krishna Kumar, founder and CEO of CropIn , said: "The robust predictive power of digital technology provides agriculture with great potential to meet its many challenges in the future. The industry captures more data than ever before, and the content of the data can be described as all-encompassing. , From agricultural economy, weather and logistics to market price fluctuations, etc., helped reduce the severe data gaps in the entire value chain. In order to improve yield, optimize production, and enhance resilience and sustainability, agricultural enterprises are paying more and more attention to innovative agricultural technology solutions Solutions such as artificial intelligence, data analysis and the Internet of Things. CropIn is very pleased to promote the "artificial intelligence culture" in agriculture."
Headquartered in Singapore, ABC World Asia’s investment targets are companies that focus on bringing significant and positive social or environmental impacts while being able to deliver attractive risk-adjusted returns.
David Heng, founder and CEO of ABC World Asia , said: “Sustainable food and agriculture is a core investment theme of ABC World Asia. Agriculture is an important pillar of the global economy, especially in promoting Asian growth and meeting the rapid growth of the region. This is especially true in terms of the population’s food needs. The industry’s challenges today are more severe than before, and the global outbreak of the new crown epidemic has highlighted the weaknesses in the global food supply and affected the livelihoods of many small farmers. CropIn’s digital solutions Enable farmers to use real-time data to make better decisions and improve farm productivity. This investment demonstrates our support for such smart, sustainable agricultural technology solutions, and these solutions help build agricultural resilience. "Ms. Sugandhi Matta, managing director of ABC World Asia, will join CropIn's board of directors as a director.
CropIn’s existing investors include BeeNext and the Strategic Investment Fund (London and Seattle) of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In the past year, CropIn has also established an advisory board, whose members include Barrett Mooney (Chairman of AgEagle), Ranveer Chandra (Chief Scientist of Microsoft), TVG Krishnamurthy (Director of Ola), and Dr. Iya Khalil (Global Leader of Novartis Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center) people).
Karan Mohla, partner of Chiratae Ventures India Advisors, said: “As an active investor in the field of agricultural technology and pioneering companies in deep technology and artificial intelligence, we are very excited about the innovative models created by CropIn in the field of farm management and predictive analysis. As for the multi-participant platform in the agricultural ecosystem, CropIn has established its position as a true global leader. Under the leadership of Krishna and co-founder Kunal Prasad, they have built a large world-class team and advisory committee , And is moving towards becoming a large-scale international company."
Ambit Corporate Finance acted as the financial advisor for CropIn's financing round. After the new round of financing, CropIn has so far raised $33.1 million.
About CropIn
CropIn is the world's leading artificial intelligence-driven agricultural technology organization, dedicated to providing software as a service and data solutions for global agricultural enterprises. CropIn enables companies in the agricultural ecosystem to adopt a data-driven business model through its "ground to cloud" technical solutions.
CropIn's unique set of platforms (SmartFarm and SmartRisk) enables multiple stakeholders to adopt and promote digital strategies throughout their crop value chain and operations. Companies use digital insights to empower agribusinesses. These insights help drive initiatives related to digitalization, predictability, traceability, financial inclusion, climate-smart agriculture, and sustainable development.
For more information, please visit www.cropin.com .
About ABC World Asia
Headquartered in Singapore, ABC World Asia is a private equity fund dedicated to impact investing. Impact investing is designed to create significant and positive social or environmental impacts while delivering attractive risk-adjusted returns.
ABC World Asia was founded by Temasek Trust, the charity of Singapore investment company Temasek. The fund’s investment strategy targets Temasek’s ABC framework, which is an Active Economy, a Beautiful Society and a Clean Earth (Active Economy, a Beautiful Society and a Clean Earth), which is born out of one of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Noble idea.
The themes that ABC World Asia focuses on include: financial and digital inclusion, better health and education, climate and water solutions, sustainable food and agriculture, and smart and livable cities.