Startup Founders Looking to AgTech as next Frontier

KisanHub is a startup with a simple mission: using tech to help farmers grow more crops more efficiently, while using less land. While iPad app developers might not immediately think of agriculture and farming when they think of unicorn-level startup opportunities, venture capitalists beg to differ — KisanHub just closed a $1 million seed funding round.

The cloud-based data management platform is one of many, including Estonia’s VitalFields, to catch the eyes of investors in a seemingly saturated urban tech marketplace. Mobile app developers and sharing economy developers are increasingly looking outside the city limits for opportunities, and AgTech is the ultimate answer: an enormous industry that is practically untouched by all that mobile tech has to offer businesses both large and small.

Said KisanHub founder and CEO Sachin Shende, “KisanHub blends diverse datasets like farm, crop, operation records, weather, satellite, commodities, farm machinery, sensors, among others, to provide data-driven decision points. We make sense of such hugely heterogeneous datasets to generate and derive intelligent trends and patterns. The platform frees growers from managing and analyzing complex data.”

The move towards AgTech represents a huge opportunity for seed-stage startup founders looking to build national-scale products. While major players like AirBnB and Uber have the urban “shared economies” on lockdown, rural areas in the US still barely get Internet connection. Inefficiencies are at the heart of virtually all profitable startups, and even “factory farms” have massive potential gains by adopting even basic technologies in their strategies and practices.

KisanHub solves many of those problems, including optimizing timing for irregular cycles like soil fertilization and watering. The platforms end users — namely, farmers — are increasing their yields dramatically as a result.

The question for Boston iPhone app developers is: what else isn’t working in rural areas? And how can technology fix it?