“Growth, growth, fast growth,” Strey says of what investors were after. “You burn money to grow.” Before its introduction to venture capital, the Plantix team had imagined success as simply making a profitable business. But a modest goal “hasn’t always been that sexy for investors,” who prefer to rapidly build toward a single giant payout, Strey says.
The team quickly realized that if Plantix was going to survive as a brilliant idea with no clear business model, they would have to give venture capitalists what they wanted: More downloads, more users who could somehow, someday be monetized.
At that point, Plantix was considering operating in Mali, population 23 million. After learning at an innovation conference that India was home to approximately 150 million smallholders, Strey jumped to shift the company’s focus to the subcontinent. The team quickly established a partnership with a local research group and 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 about 300,000 monthly users and raised $4.9 million in one more round of VC 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, its government has aggressively expanded telecommunications infrastructure, increasing the number of smartphone users to about 450 million people and doubling coverage in rural areas. That meant a farmer walking through an ailing field in Jharkhand could be scrolling Plantix in search of remedies.
To use the app, farmers provide their crop selection, acreage, and input applications, then upload photos with embedded GPS coordinates. Some growers use the app weekly or even daily, contributing to a deep and detailed real-time image of farming across India. Their use has helped Plantix’s AI grow more accurate while collecting information that could prove invaluable to crop buyers, seed sellers, tool manufacturers, loan lenders, insurance providers, and pesticide sellers.
During pitches, Strey told me, she saw how investors lit up at just the mention of data. “[The idea] sold good toward the investors, even though we never proved that we could make money out of it.”
The problem, as many companies have discovered, is that every buyer of data wants some particular slice of the information presented in a specific way. Plantix would need to be reorganized around producing and packaging marketable data products, and the economics never penciled out.