This App Set Out to Fight Pesticides. After VCs Stepped In, Now It Helps Sell Them

October 24, 2024:

“Growth, growth, fast growth,” Strey says of what investors were after. “You burn money to grow.” Before its introduction to venture capital, the Plantix team had imagined success as simply making a profitable business. But a modest goal “hasn’t always been that sexy for investors,” who prefer to rapidly build toward a single giant payout, Strey says.

The team quickly realized that if Plantix was going to survive as a brilliant idea with no clear business model, they would have to give venture capitalists what they wanted: More downloads, more users who could somehow, someday be monetized.

At that point, Plantix was considering operating in Mali, population 23 million. After learning at an innovation conference that India was home to approximately 150 million smallholders, Strey jumped to shift the company’s focus to the subcontinent. The team quickly established a partnership with a local research group and set up a field office in Hyderabad and began teaching the algorithm to recognize local pests and crops in Indian languages. By the end of January 2018, Plantix had grown to about 300,000 monthly users and raised $4.9 million in one more round of VC funding.

Moving to India, where food and agriculture is an $800 billion industry, has become an obvious choice for aspiring agritech startups. In recent years, its government has aggressively expanded telecommunications infrastructure, increasing the number of smartphone users to about 450 million people and doubling coverage in rural areas. That meant a farmer walking through an ailing field in Jharkhand could be scrolling Plantix in search of remedies.

To use the app, farmers provide their crop selection, acreage, and input applications, then upload photos with embedded GPS coordinates. Some growers use the app weekly or even daily, contributing to a deep and detailed real-time image of farming across India. Their use has helped Plantix’s AI grow more accurate while collecting information that could prove invaluable to crop buyers, seed sellers, tool manufacturers, loan lenders, insurance providers, and pesticide sellers.

During pitches, Strey told me, she saw how investors lit up at just the mention of data. “[The idea] sold good toward the investors, even though we never proved that we could make money out of it.”

The problem, as many companies have discovered, is that every buyer of data wants some particular slice of the information presented in a specific way. Plantix would need to be reorganized around producing and packaging marketable data products, and the economics never penciled out.

Source link

tags

Abkhazia Afghanistan Africa Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Cape Verde Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Costa Rica Croatia Cuba Curacao Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic East Timor Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Fiji Finland France French Polynesia Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Grenada Guam Guatemala Guinea Guyana Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North Korea North Macedonia Northern Cyprus Norway Oman Pakistan Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Republic of the Congo Romania Russia Rwanda Saint Lucia Samoa San Marino Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Sweden Switzerland Syria Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Uganda UK Ukraine United Arab Emirates Uruguay USA Uzbekistan Vatican City Venezuela Vietnam Western Sahara Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe