CropIn Technology Solutions, an agriculture technology start-up, has raised Rs 58 crore ($8 million) in a Series B financing from Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures India) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Strategic Investment Fund.  With this capital infusion and its increasingly rich data-set, CropIn Technology Solutions will develop its machine-learning-based ‘SmartRisk’ platform further to achieve plot-level crop detection and yield prediction, CropIn said in a statement today.

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The financing is expected to scale CropIn’s ‘SmartFarm’ technology platform in India and globally to expand its reach from 3 million acres and 2 million farmers to over 10 million acres and 7 million farmers.  CropIn enables businesses in the agriculture-ecosystem to adopt a data-driven approach through its ground-to-cloud technology platform. Headquartered in Bengaluru, the company has more than 180 customers across 29 countries,it said. 

It helps agribusinesses to ‘grow more with less’, and drive initiatives around digitisation, traceability, predictability, sustainability and compliance. CropIn's client portfolio includes many large global gri businesses, banks, government bodies and development agencies. Through its product platform, CropIn addresses a global market of digital-based agriculture services that is estimated to hit $4.5 billion by 2020.

The company’s initial product, SmartFarm, is a customisable mobile app and web interface for farm management deployed across agri-businesses’, allowing field agents for business-to-business-to-farmer plot-level farm management.  "Since data are collected and curated by agri-business employees at the plot-level and scrubbed for any inconsistencies by CropIn, there is high-confidence that the information accurately reflects what is happening on the farm representing 'ground-truth' data," the statement said. 

With the help of these data, CropIn enhances traceability and monitoring for its agri-business clients through various software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. “To feed the 9.7 billion people in the world in 2050, agriculture efficiency must increase by 35%- 70% and technology is the key."