AgroScout
AgroScout is pioneering an app for monitoring crop pests & diseases, using the farmer’s own low cost drone. The price cutting app has the potential of becoming an indispensable tool for millions of farmers worldwide.
279% of funding target
Highlights
Highlights
Groundbreaking technology – AI agronomy using only user-generated content
AgroScout introduces an affordable, self-service app for the early detection of pests and diseases for millions of farmers around the world. The app was designed by adhering to the rule that AI solutions must be affordable and easy to use for wide market acceptance. To achieve that goal, the app harnesses the autonomous flight capabilities of inexpensive entry-level drones, adapted cloud-based AI algorithms and relies purely on free user-generated content. The app’s early detection capabilities allow for pinpoint treatment of pests and disease, compared to current treatment protocols that call for the destruction of entire fields to stop the spread of crop diseases.
Outstanding Potential Market Size
There are hundreds of million of farmers worldwide and the majority of them Are small or medium size, creating a market currently evaluated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. For them, AgroScout’s application delivers the only economically viable solution due to extremely low operating costs. Based on extremely low operational costs and a Freemium business model, AgroScout can reach hundreds of million potential paying customers for this product.
Affordable product for hundreds of millions of farmers
Existing monitoring solutions for agriculture are expensive and inaccessible to most of the world’s farmers.. AgroScout’s app is accessible to approximately 80% of the farmers worldwide. The app allows farmers to effortlessly pinpoint pests and disease at a very early stage, minimizing damage to crops. In rural areas known for strong community collaboration, neighboring farmers can easily share one drone, thus accelerating the system’s adoption.
Significant investments and collaboration with Oracle and leading farmers in Israel and around the world
AgroScout has already gained trust from leading partners. The company received approximately a $1M investment from private investors, the Israel Innovation Authority and The Trendlines Group. Moreover, AgroScout is cooperating with large retailers and collaborating with leading farms in the U.S. market as part of its beta testing and product launch. Starting in May 2019, AgroScout has been cooperating with the Cloud division of tech giant Oracle, which allows the company to grow significantly and accumulate millions of users of the app quickly and effectively without the risk of server outages.
Expert team leading the company
AgroScout led by its founder Simcha Shore and its first hire, CTO Ilan Ehrenfeld. Jointly they bring over three decades of experience leading technology projects and specifically in the deployment of drones and image processing. Mr. Shore spent over 10 years leading tech projects for the Israeli army intelligence. Mr. Ehrenfeld has over 25 years of experience leading complex technological projects at high-tech companies, including leading the development of a micro drone.
Pitch
Pitch
AgroScout has developed a unique, cost-effective app to battle pests and diseases in agriculture. Farmers continue to lose approximately 30% of their crop to disease and pests, that would be enough produce to feed 2 billion more people (the expected world population growth by 2050). AgroScout’s app for self-detecting and monitoring pests and disease offers a 1 minute setup and easy to use solution for 80% of the farmers worldwide. AI crop protection is a privilege currently enjoyed by a mere 5% of farmers that deploy “out of reach equipment”. With its extremely affordable and effective solution for hundreds of farmers around the world, AgroScout has the potential to save tens of billions of dollars for millions of farmers (a.k.a farm owners).
The company’s solution
Existing crop monitoring solutions are operated by trained employees and harness cutting-edge hardware, “monster” sci-fi drones and aerial photography previously only available to governments and security organizations. These systems are all out of reach for about 95% of the world’s farmers.
AgroScout provides an affordable and easy-to-use AI solution based solely on user-generated content. To maintain its affordability, the app was designed to rely on equipment that is widely used on farms: smartphones and simple drones. The app offers field protection in under one minute of user’s time. farmers simply download the app, press “Sync My Drone,” use the intuitive map wizard to mark the field, press “Protect,” and wait 20 minutes while the app collects field data results.
The AgroScout team set out to squeeze the maximum out these widely used “toys” to turn them into premium autonomous AI data collectors. This app beats a professional human scout, 100-fold when comparing field coverage, and for significantly less money. Harnessing the users’ free data collection and the power of cumulative data collecting, the app is currently the only affordable individual plant level solution for pest and disease detection. Agroscout’s thin design circumvents high operation costs by relying on the users to use their simple equipment to collect data. The thin design is key to making this solution accessible and affordable to 80% of the planet’s 500 million farmers.
The company’s technology
AgroScout developed the first “self-service” AI app for the early discovery of pests and diseases in agriculture by relying purely on user-generated content and user-owned drones. Since agriculture is known as a low-margin sector, AI solutions built on expensive company-owned equipment have seen good technical progress but haven’t been able to offer an affordable solution for 90% of the world’s farmers. The app puts cutting-edge AI in the palm of 80% of the 500 million farmers worldwide, as compared to the current 5%. The app’s main strengths lie in its ability to ensure the quality of data collected from low-cost, off-the-shelf drones, such as DJI’s Mavic and Phantom and the app’s algorithms ability to learn quickly. Farmers can download the free app, sync with their drone and immediately start protecting their crops. The app relies mainly on members of the community to tag pests and diseases. Community contribution comes naturally to farmers, which will help integrate the AgroScout app into the agricultural world, turning it to Waze of agricultural industry.
product advantages
AgroScout’s application has several advantages over other agriculture monitoring solutions:
- Infinitesimal incremental operating cost per user – AgroScout does not deploy any field equipment and relies purely on user-generated content and user-owned equipment. AgroScout set out to enable quality data collection based on widely used, equipment that is prevalent on farms: mobile phones and FAA-excluded self-operated drones. By developing smart autopiloting for these relatively cheap user-owned drones, AgroScout opens the door to AI protection to 80% of the 500 million farmers worldwide.
- Immediate and continuous availability –
- Like anything you do own your own, farmers gain flexibility and control to check fields between rain showers or for use in remote rural areas or even to check twice a day, in comparison to systems that require scheduling ground teams that may arrive late and or may only be affordable for cash-rich crops.
- Optimal coverage – The AgroScout app allows average farmers to achieve 100% field coverage instead of the 1% field coverage farmers can afford by hiring a person to sample his fields.
- Pests and disease detection down to the single plant – Plant-level discovery with planes and satellites isn’t usually possible or economical. By relying on the user and the user’s equipment to collect data, the app can offer farmers detection down to the single plant.
- Early discovery of pests and disease and fast discovery of uncharted infections – Amazingly fast discovery and learning is made possible by relying on users for data collection and tagging, fast-learning AI algorithms and the aggregated information collected from the large community of users.
- All weather – The app is not sensitive to weather. The app relies on the users’ simple off-the-shelf drones capable of autonomous low-height flight above crops and not greatly influenced by low clouds and other weather conditions.
Team
Team
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Mr. Shore has vast experience in leading projects related to the development of information systems, remote sensing, image processing, AI and drones during his meaningful 21-year career in the Israel Defense Force’s Intelligence unit, where he reached the rank of major. He holds a BA in Middle East and Asian studies and an MA with a specialization in China. In addition, Mr. Shore received a diploma of information systems engineering and analysis from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
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Mr. Ehrenfeld has more than 25 years of experience leading various projects in the high-tech industry in the fields of image processing, computerized vision and drones. From 2005 to 2011, Mr. Ehrenfeld led image processing and drone projects at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. He has years of experience consulting to U.S. start-ups and global tech companies. Mr. Ehrenfeld holds a BA in computer science from the Open University of Israel and an MBA, with a specialization in entrepreneurship and high-tech management, from Ariel University.
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Mr. Bar-Av has rich experience in leading and managing agricultural projects, both in the lab and in the field. He served as a research engineer at Israel (ARO) Volcani Center, where he lead the planning and execution of research in accurate irrigation and crop protection. Mr. Bar-Av has vast experience in plant protection and growing seeds. He received his BScAgr from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an MScAgr in desert agriculture from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
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