SATSURE

Prateep Basu had a background in remote sensing and earth observation before he co-founded SatSure in 2017 with Rashmit Singh and Abhishek Raju. The founding insight was straightforward: the cost of satellite data had fallen dramatically in the preceding decade, and machine learning had made it possible to extract meaningful agricultural intelligence from that data at scale.

The obvious application was agricultural lending and insurance in markets like India, where 600 million people depend on farming but only a fraction have access to formal credit. The team built a minimum viable product focused on crop monitoring and loan assessment, pitched it to banks and insurance companies, and found enough early customers to validate the thesis.

They are based in Bangalore and also have offices in Zurich, which has given them access to European agri-insurance markets.

SatSure sells data-as-a-service and analytics products to financial institutions, insurance companies, and governments. The core workflow is: satellite imagery is ingested and processed using machine learning models, which produce outputs that are useful for decision-making — crop health scores, yield predictions, area estimation, weather-risk assessments.

Customers pay for access to these outputs through APIs and dashboard tools. The flagship product for lending, SILVAR (Satellite Imagery-based Loan Verification and Assessment of Risk), allows banks to evaluate agricultural loan applications using remotely sensed crop data rather than requiring physical farm visits.

This dramatically reduces the cost and time of agricultural credit assessment, making it viable to lend to smallholder farmers at scale.

SILVAR (Satellite Imagery-based Loan Verification and Assessment of Risk) — the core financial product. Generates a risk assessment for agricultural loans using satellite data, replacing the need for physical farm visits in the credit approval process.

Used by Indian banks and microfinance institutions for kisan credit card applications and farm loan origination. Crop Intelligence Platform — a monitoring and analytics tool used by agri-insurance companies and commodity traders to track crop health and predict yields across large geographies.

Used in PMFBY crop insurance claims verification. Government Analytics Suite — a set of tools for state and national government agencies to monitor agricultural conditions for policy and food security planning.

SatSure grew primarily through direct enterprise sales to banks and insurance companies in India, where the regulatory environment for agricultural lending and crop insurance creates consistent demand for better data. The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) — India's national crop insurance scheme — created a large market for the kind of automated, scalable crop assessment SatSure could provide.

Winning early contracts with large insurance companies gave them the data and track record to expand into new markets. Their Switzerland presence was a deliberate choice to access European reinsurance companies, which need the same kind of agricultural risk data globally.

Satellite data is only as good as the models interpreting it, and agricultural AI models require enormous amounts of labeled ground-truth data to train properly. Collecting that ground truth — actually going to farms and recording what is growing and how healthy it is — is expensive and slow.

SatSure has had to invest heavily in field data collection to improve model accuracy, which is a constraint on how fast they can expand into new crop types and geographies. There is also the challenge of explaining a satellite-derived credit score to a loan officer who has spent his career using traditional assessment methods.

SatSure raised early funding from Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures India), one of India's most established early-stage technology investors. Foundation Capital, a Silicon Valley VC firm, also participated in the company's funding — an unusual endorsement for an Indian deep-tech company.

Other backers include angels from the agriculture and financial services space. The funding profile is modest relative to some consumer tech startups, which reflects the enterprise-focused nature of the business and the longer sales cycles involved.