Agriculture is a thirsty industry, consuming seventy percent of all fresh water used worldwide. In some countries, like India or Chile, this figure can be more than ninety percent.
For Mario Bustamante, who lives in Chile, the problem hits close to home. He stated that a lack of water is a big issue there.
Bustamante is betting that artificial intelligence can help slash water use on farms across the world. His startup, Instacrops, was originally founded to deploy internet-of-things sensors on farms to warn farmers about damaging frost conditions. As the hardware became more commoditized, the company pivoted to focus on software and water use.
Now, Instacrops is helping two hundred sixty farms cut their water use by up to thirty percent while also increasing crop yields by as much as twenty percent. The company is part of Startup Battlefield and will be presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt later this month in San Francisco.
The switch from hardware to AI transformed the company, allowing it to operate with fewer staff while processing more data. Bustamante said they are processing approximately fifteen million data points per hour, an amount that would have taken a full year to process almost a decade ago. He explained that they are reducing costs, team members, and generating more impact with less.
Instacrops can install new IoT sensors or connect to a farm’s existing network to collect data. This data is used to advise farmers on when to irrigate different areas. The startup’s LLM models ingest more than eighty parameters, including soil moisture, humidity, temperature, pressure, crop yield, and NDVI, which is a plant productivity metric derived from satellite imagery.
Those advisories are sent directly to farmers’ mobile phones. Instacrops offers a chatbot app, but it also integrates with WhatsApp. Bustamante believes that in the next year they will be one hundred percent on WhatsApp because it is a universal tool for any farmer. On more technologically advanced farms, Instacrops can control irrigation systems directly.
Instacrops is focused on high-value crops in Latin America, including apples, avocados, blueberries, almonds, and cherries. Farmers pay an annual fee per hectare of farmland to gain access to the startup’s irrigation insights.
The startup was part of the Y Combinator summer 2021 batch and has received investments from SVG Ventures and Genesis Ventures.