Farm advisory is ineffective without financing for recommended agricultural inputs
Krishna Kumar · Inside the mind of Krishna Kumar, Founder, CropIn- the largest Agritech SaaS startup of India · Jan 4, 2021 · at 32:41
Krishna Kumar, founder and CEO of CropIn, explains why CropIn expanded beyond advisory into lending and insurance risk underwriting.
0:00 / 0:21exact quote · 21.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“If the farmer doesn't have access to financing, nothing is going to change. If he has surplus money, he can do experiment. If he has the money, he can use your advice and put some right, you know, input into his farm. But let's say if you give him a best of the best advice, and he doesn't have money to buy those chemical fertilizers or whatever growth enhancers, he will not able to do that.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Krishna Kumar
Kumar: CropIn was the first company globally doing data-driven farming
“We were the first company globally to talk about data-driven farming. In US and Europe also, you know, many startups has come up, but they came after”
Startups driving behavioral change should target large enterprises over SMBs
“People say when you are in a startup, go to a smaller companies who can write a check quickly, take a decision quickly. And this was advice I got from many of my mentors, but I went against it. I went to the enterprise because in GE, I know to bring a change, …”
Kumar: CropIn adopted a strict policy to never conduct free POCs
“And after that, we always decided that we will never do a free POC and every client paid us. And actually that funded our whole, you know, initial days when we didn't have the funding.”
Kumar: Raising VC without a proven US parallel is very difficult
“In a stage where nobody has ventured, it's very difficult to get the venture money because there is no parallel. Today, a lot of investment happened because there's a parallel in US or somewhere it has worked or in a similar market.”
Text advisory outperforms audio calls because rural farmers hang up
“We can do audio also, but you know, what we in our study, what we have found that nobody picks the phone and even somebody picks the phone, they cut because that's the, because it's coming from some number. So, so in order to be more relevant, it's better to h…”