CROPIN

Krishna Kumar was working in the agribusiness space in India in the late 2000s and kept running into the same problem: large companies managing thousands of contract farmers had no visibility into what was actually happening in their fields. Decisions about planting, inputs, and harvesting were being made on gut feel and phone calls.

In 2010, he co-founded Cropin in Bangalore with Chandra Nair to build software that could bring basic data visibility to agricultural supply chains. The early product was simple — a mobile app for field agents to collect farm data.

Over time, the product evolved significantly as satellite data became cheaper and AI models became more powerful, and Cropin found itself with a platform that could predict crop yields, detect crop stress early, and help banks assess agricultural lending risk from orbit.

Cropin sells software to agribusinesses — seed companies, food processors, commodity traders, banks, and governments — that need to manage and monitor large networks of farms. Think of it as a CRM and ERP for the agricultural supply chain, with a satellite layer on top.

Customers pay subscription fees to access the platform. The value proposition is practical: a seed company that supplies 50,000 smallholder farmers can use Cropin to track planting dates, identify problem farms early, and predict harvest volumes with far more accuracy than the old clipboard method.

Banks use a product called SmartRisk to make lending decisions based on satellite-derived crop health data rather than paper documentation that may not exist.

SmartFarm — the core platform. Agribusinesses use it to manage contract farmers, track field activities, and monitor crop progress across large areas.

Works on mobile for field agents and on web dashboards for management teams. SmartRisk — a lending assessment product aimed at banks and microfinance institutions.

Uses satellite imagery and AI to generate a risk assessment for farm loans without requiring the traditional paper trail, which opens agricultural credit to farmers who don't have it. Cropin Intelligence — a data and analytics layer that lets customers query historical and real-time data across their farming networks.

Useful for supply chain planning and market forecasting.

Cropin grew by going deep in India first — building relationships with the large agribusinesses and commodity companies that already existed and needed this kind of data. The key insight that unlocked international growth was realising that the satellite data layer made the product geography-agnostic.

Unlike most enterprise software, Cropin could be deployed in a new country without requiring a large on-the-ground team, because much of the farm-level data could be gathered remotely. This let them expand into Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America without proportional headcount growth.

Partnerships with development finance institutions — including CDC Group (now British International Investment) and the International Finance Corporation — also opened doors in emerging markets.

Selling enterprise software to conservative industries is always slow. Agribusiness, farming, and rural banking are not early adopters.

Many potential customers in developing markets still use paper-based processes, which makes the data quality challenge significant — Cropin can pull satellite data, but ground-truth validation still requires humans in the field. Competing with spreadsheets and WhatsApp groups is unglamorous.

The other challenge is that in many of their markets, the infrastructure (connectivity, smartphones) is still patchy, which limits how much the platform can do in real time.

Cropin has been backed by Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners), which led its Series B in 2018. The British International Investment (formerly CDC Group), the UK government's development finance institution, invested as part of the company's growth stage rounds — a signal that Cropin's agricultural finance tools had development impact credentials as well as commercial ones.

Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures India) and Caspian Impact Investments have also been shareholders from earlier stages. Asia Impact, a Singapore-based impact investor, participated in later rounds.