“Growth, growth, rapid growth,” Stray says of what investors were looking for. “To grow, you burn money.” Before being introduced to venture capital, the Plantic team envisioned success simply as running a profitable business. But “modest goals weren’t necessarily appealing to investors,” who like to accumulate money quickly for one big payout, Storey said.
The team quickly realized that if Plantic was to survive as a great idea without a clear business model, it needed to give venture capitalists what they wanted. That means more downloads, more users that can one day be monetized in some way.
At that point, Planticx was considering operations in Mali, a country of 23 million people. After learning at an innovation conference that there are approximately 150 million smallholders in India, Stray jumped at the idea of shifting his company’s focus to the subcontinent. The team quickly partnered with local research groups, set up a field office in Hyderabad, and began teaching algorithms to recognize local pests and crops in Indian languages. By the end of January 2018, Plantic had grown to approximately 300,000 monthly users and raised $4.9 million in another round of VC funding.
With food and agriculture being an $800 billion industry, moving to India has become an obvious choice for ambitious agritech startups. In recent years, the government has aggressively expanded telecommunications infrastructure, with the number of smartphone users increasing to approximately 450 million and rural coverage doubling. That means a farmer walking through a sick field in Jharkhand could be scrolling through Plantix in search of a cure.
To use the app, farmers provide crop selection, acreage, input applications, and upload a photo with embedded GPS coordinates. Some farmers use the app on a weekly or daily basis, contributing to a deep and detailed real-time picture of agriculture across India. These uses Plantic’s AI while gathering information that could prove invaluable to crop buyers, seed sellers, tool manufacturers, lenders, insurance companies, and agrochemical distributors. Improved accuracy.
Stray told me during his pitch that he saw investors get excited just by talking about the data. “(The idea) was well-received by investors, even though it didn’t prove that it would be profitable.”
The problem, as many companies have discovered, is that data buyers all want specific pieces of information presented in a specific way. Plantix needed to reorganize around manufacturing and packaging marketable data products, but the economics were never clear.
