India's CropIn gets $8m Series B

CropIn aims to help small farmers improve their land management and yield prediction through a suite of cloud-based data collection and analysis tools. Its flagship product, SmartFarm, is used by more than 180 businesses, accounting for 3 million acres of farmland. The software combines real-time data on crop conditions with weather information to predict patterns and provide actionable insights to farmers, processors, distributors, lenders, and insurers.

The agriculture technology services market is expected to be worth $4.5 billion by 2020, and CropIn aims to create a global platform to address farmers’ needs. While India’s mix of different farming practices and small landholdings provides the company with a useful baseline for developing its models, the company plans to expand the range of data collected from the other 28 countries in which it operates.

“As a SaaS [software-as-a-service] company, geography has never been a limiting factor for expanding our customer base,” said Krishna Kumar, founder and CEO of CropIn, in a statement. “We are currently active throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America and in select European markets. As ground-truth information from these geographies continues to fill our data lake, it provides insights that create a paradigm shift in the agriculture ecosystem globally.”

Chiratae currently has over $450 million in assets under management and is investing its third fund, which closed at $208 million last year. The firm launched in 2006 and rebranded this year to emphasize its focus on high-growth Indian start-ups with a potential for global expansion.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Technology
• Support services
• Early-stage
• India
• TMT
• Agriculture