Little I know about this agritech space, but like any other industry we draw a comparative analysis with Israel and Netherlands to advance agritech in India but highly ignore the intricacies of being innovative and the unit economics of Indian Market.
There is a derth of good technologies that are even good at lab scale leave alone optimizing 1000 acre field. False prophecies of AI-ML before going to nano scale accuracy of sensor tech is like promising a Ferrari to a kid. What most startups or even research labs end up spending(“loosing”) is a great load of man hours and a million dollar.They hope that information derived by sensor and used to prescribe wide array of advisories with “AI-ML” would optimize input or reduce cost at expected theoretical levels. This sort of becomes a short lived stint and all blabber for the farmers. To climb a ladder you cannot skip a few steps similarly accurate data collection is the key to farm analytics. What is the problem then, the real problem is India ranks 52 in Global Innovation Index while being 100x in size of Netherlands or Israel.
But India ranks high on “passion to solve real world problems” and the passion is clearly visible on momentous occasion such as ISROs Mangalyan Mission. A highly complex mission costing just 64 Million USD to get in the vicinity of beautiful red planet. Our team was fortunate enough to experience this passion firsthand and work with ISRO for little over a year to solve the problem of data collection in farms and develop a tangible sensor that can revolutionize farm analytics. We always had two objectives in mind first: Unmatched accuracy and second: Cut the cost. So in real world what would require a million dollar or so was actually done in unbelievable timelines and few Lakh rupees. After graduating to walk a few miles in this space we faced funny side of this world! Some critiques would say where is the million dollar project cost compendium, definitely we don’t have it because we were able to do it at 100x lesser. Innovation for us has always been about moving ahead of time with greatest efficiency. I think it’s a great time to go up on the innovation index by joining hands and reverberating the passion within us.