Cropin secures pre-Series-D funding as two tech companies make strategic investments

Bengaluru-based agritech start-up, Cropin, has secured a pre-series round of funding from “two big tech companies”, the company’s founder and CEO, Krishna Kumar, has revealed. Kumar was speaking to journalists on the sidelines of AWS’ Re:Invent Conference in Las Vegas.

“We have almost closed that transaction — and this has happened even as we speak,” Kumar later told CNBC-TV18 in a one-on-one chat, “The pre-series funding is strategic in nature and involves two tech players.” He did not divulge names of the companies who made these investments.

“We are going LIVE in January with our Series-D funding, and we are already talking to some of investors who have already expressed interest,” he added, “We’ll see if we can close it in the next six months.”

Thus far Cropin has seen off three rounds of funding and secured funding totalling to $34 million from investors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Strategic Investment Fund, ABC World Asia, Chiratae Ventures, Ankur Capital and Infosys founder Kris Gopalakrishnan. The start-up has already announced that it hoped to target $50 million to $70 million in fresh investments through the Series-D round.

The start-up is expected to use these funds to complete its expansion plans. It recently opened its US office in Delaware, and has on-ground presence in Europe.

“We are beefing up our teams because we work with large enterprises, and it requires that new capabilities be built to service them,” said Kumar. The company will also invest in its AI lab and platform capabilities, which Kumar estimates will require a large chunk of investment.

Cropin made headlines recently for the launch of Cropin Cloud — a unified approach to digitising the farming process using cloud technology that provides insights and data to help develop agricultural solutions that come with pin-point precision.

The start-up has joined hands with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop these capabilities, which is believes will help it scale up in the near future.

“The industry is going to be powered by a knowledge graph, without which AI does not make any sense,” said Kumar, “We are in 92 countries today, manage 500 different crops, 10,000 different varieties and have data from every possible continent spanning different geographies and climatic conditions.”

According to Cropin’s estimates, the 0.2 billion hectares of farm intelligence that it has already harvested, which will now be used to scale up, means it has the ability to make predictions for every farm on the planet, in the near future.

“This scale will help us build solutions and intelligence at the country level, “We are expecting to have representation of 5 percent of global ground-up data on the platform in the next three years, which will give us the ability to make predictions for every farm on the planet.”

The last two years have seen Cropin register a 2.5x growth, with some reports pointing to average recurring revenue of $15 million to $25 million. While the company isn’t willing to make revenue projections, Kumar said he was confident of Cropin registering 2x growth, year-on-year.