“Growth, growth, rapid growth” – Strey says what investors expected. “You burn money to grow.” Before being introduced to venture capital, the Plantix team imagined success as simply turning around a profitable business. But the modest goal “hasn’t always been as attractive to investors” who prefer to move quickly toward one giant payday, Strey says.
The team quickly realized that if Plantix was going to survive as a brilliant idea without a clear business model, it had to give venture capitalists what they wanted: more downloads, more users who could one day make money in some way.
At this point, Plantix was considering operating in Mali, which has a population of 23 million. After learning at an innovation conference that there were approximately 150 million smallholder farmers in India, Strey immediately decided to shift the company’s focus to the subcontinent. The team quickly partnered with a local research group, 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 approximately 300,000 monthly users and had raised $4.9 million in another round of VC funding.
Moving to India, where food and agriculture is an $800 billion industry, has become an obvious choice for aspiring ag startups. In recent years, his government has aggressively expanded telecommunications infrastructure, increasing the number of smartphone users to about 450 million people and doubling coverage in rural areas. This meant that a farmer passing through a diseased field in Jharkhand could browse Plantix for remedies.
To apply the app, farmers enter crop selection, acreage and input applications, then upload photos with embedded GPS coordinates. Some farmers apply the app on a weekly or even daily basis, creating a deep and detailed real-time picture of agriculture across India. Their apply has helped Plantix’s artificial intelligence become more right when gathering information that could prove invaluable to crop buyers, seed sellers, tool makers, lenders, insurers and pesticide sellers.
Strey told me that during the presentation, she saw investors perk up at the mere mention of data. “[The idea] We were selling a good to investors even though we had never proven we could make a profit from it.”
The problem, as many companies have discovered, is that each data buyer wants a specific piece of information presented in a specific way. Plantix would require a reorganization in the production and packaging of salable data products, and the economics have not yet been determined.