CropIn Technology on Way to Become the Backbone of Crop Insurances

Bangalore: A 6-Year–Young Startup is now Betting Big on its Data Algorithms Fuelled by ‘Farm Insights and Artificial Intelligence,’ to Create Holistic Solutions for Crop Loan and Farm Insurances, to the Root Level Farmers in India

CropIn Technology Solutions is a Bengaluru-based start-up, which is now on an onslaught of initiatives to implement the benefit of Agriculture Technology (AgTech) to the last mile. After securing the Series B funding, by developing a new product called SmartRisk, CropIn Technology is now investing $5 million toward its AI (Artificial Intelligence).

SmartRisk is new application will be positioned along with the flagship SmartFarm application, which currently assists over 5 million farmers toward farm management, crop cycle monitoring, harvest and brings in produce traceability from farm to fork.

SmartRisk is a digital platform which helps Micro Finance, Banking and Non-Banking Financial Institutions to identify and minimize the risk in lending and insurance business. At a macro level, it leverages the remote sensing technology supported by data science, machine learning and AI to analyse cropped farm areas and to identify high risk and low risk zones and it has capabilities to monitor a specific farm and help enterprises identify and intervene in taking timely measures, to minimize the issues in crops.

To arrive at a score for each region at a level of 10 X 10-meter grid, the technology also analyses billions of data points (weather, soil, NDVI etc.). This helps build a credit rating for the topography analysed. All the analysis is then presented through simple and powerful dashboards which help businesses in decision making.

Chief Technology Officer, CropIn Technology, Chittranjan Jena said, “With SmartRisk, CropIn brings in the most important and valuable players of the agri ecosystem, by making them more accessible to the farmer community. SmartRisk will benefit the Government in our sincere effort to contribute to the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana where emphasis is on the one nation, one scheme type crop insurance – be it for floods or droughts. Not just the Government, but various other allied Central & State Government bodies, private – public banks, MFC’s and NBFC’s now have a robust technology to rely on. Agriculture insurance risk handling, will now be simpler and smarter with SmartRisk.”

Chief Business Officer, CropIn Technology, Siddhartha Choudhary said, “We already are working with one of India’s leading private sector bank in state of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh in India and the results are paying off. While currently only few hundred thousand farmers are now benefitting from transparent loans to buy seeds, fertilizers, farm machinery and allied. Also there are many others cooperatives and Indian state governments which are on the cusp to benefit from crop insurance during this year’s sowing cycle. At the end, we keep a farmer at the forefront of everything we do, by helping him increase his yield per acre and ensuring banks and other Government financial institutions, do not suffer losses due to unplanned bad loans and write offs.”

By working in sync with the Government (State and Central), National Agriculture Insurance Scheme (NAIS) and various business consulting forums such as ASSOCHAM and FICCI, SmartRisk is now directly aiming to benefit over twenty-five million Indian farmers through banking and insurance partners under (Non-Lending Technical Assistance – NLTA).

Source:http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/