“Growth, growth, fast growth,” Strey says of what investors were looking for. “You burn money to grow.” Before their introduction to venture capital, the Plantix team had envisioned success simply as making a profitable business. But a modest goal “hasn’t always been so attractive to investors,” who prefer to move quickly toward a single giant payout, Strey says.
The team quickly realized that if Plantix was going to survive as a brilliant idea without a clear business model, they would have to give the venture capitalists what they wanted: more downloads, more users that could somehow one day be monetized.
At the time, Plantix was considering operating in Mali, with a population of 23 million. After learning at an innovation conference that India was home to approximately 150 million smallholder farmers, Strey decided to shift the company’s focus to the subcontinent. The team quickly established a partnership 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 around 300,000 monthly users and had raised $4.9 million in a further round of venture capital 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, his government has aggressively expanded telecommunications infrastructure, increasing the number of smartphone users to around 450 million people and doubling coverage in rural areas. That meant a farmer walking through a sick field in Jharkhand could be leafing through Plantix in search of remedies.
To use the app, farmers provide their crop selection, acreage and input applications, and then upload photos with embedded GPS coordinates. Some farmers use the app weekly or even daily, helping to get a deep and detailed real-time picture of farming across India. Its use has helped make Plantix AI more accurate while gathering information that could prove invaluable to crop buyers, seed sellers, tool manufacturers, lenders, insurance providers, and pesticide sellers.
During the presentations, Strey told me, he saw investors light up at the mere mention of the data. “(The idea) sold well to investors, although we never showed that we could make money from it.”
The problem, as many companies have discovered, is that each data buyer wants a particular portion of the information presented in a specific way. Plantix would need to reorganize around the production and packaging of marketable data products, and the economics were never defined.