Agri Eye is a smart land farming solution for agricultural sector developed in Odessa, Ukraine. It is actually a spin-off project of 482 outsourcing company started by Andrey Sevryukov and three other co-founders. They participated in the program for big data startups at 1991 Open Data Incubator. At the end of the day, only Andrey decided to fully dedicate his time to the venture. In the end of last month, Agri Eye received a $150,000 angel investment from Alexey Svirid, the co-founder of the regional electronic payment system EasyPay. Alexey brought “smart money” to the table as his family is running a farm of 7,000 ha, and it’s on these lands that Agri Eye ran a proof of concept. Alexey would also join the startup as a co-founder.
Andrey Sevryukov, CEO and co-founder at Agri Eye.
Their mission is making available the high-tech full-cycle land farming solution to every farmer. To achieve it, Agri Eye interfaces together a high-performance multispectral camera carried by a drone with a precision lab and online mapping service. The drone scans fields using a multispectral camera and allows to determine where it is necessary to take samples for chemical analysis. When the analysis is performed, the online service creates a precision map of the field, describing its chemical state (nitrates, phosphorus, and potassium) and its vegetation state. Then, when the data is processed, an intelligent decision support software shows a map where and in which amounts fertilizers and herbicides should be applied, which helps to optimize and reduce the use of chemicals. “By combining technologies of chemical analysis, remote sensing and mapping we created an affordable solution (less than $2 per hectare) able to save up to 30% of land farming costs”, said Andrey Sevryukov, the CEO of Agri Eye in a comment to GoalEurope.
“The idea was born in a discussion about the Belgian agrotech, where land farming is 4 times more efficient than in Ukraine thanks to Precision technologies, so I wanted to develop a solution for precision land farming based on remote sensing”, continued Andrey. A research by the World Bank shows that Ukraine loses about 50,000 hectares of farming lands annually due to erosion and depletion of soils, which results in $10 billion of losses. Andrey believes that their AgriMap, an open data solution, can prevent 50% of soil loss by timely informing about critical stages and trends.
The system is composed of:
– a drone packed with sensors responsible for data acquisition in the cropping areas,
– a SaaS platform for storing and processing big data,
– a decision support system powered by Machine Learning and Intelligent Prediction algorithms
Alexey Svirid, angel investor and co-founder at Agri Eye.
Agri Eye is built as a SaaS solution supporting freemium business model. Based on a research paper released by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Bank, the potential size of the global farming optimization market is around $80 billion, and its current volume is at $43 billion. According to Agri Eye’s estimates, farmers in the US only are able to spend around $18 billion on this kind of smart products and services, which is about 1% of their turnover. Latin America and the EU are other potentially interesting regions, with a market size of $8B and $3B, respectively.They estimate that their target audience counts about 40,000 farms and expect to conquer 20% of smart agriculture solutions market within three years.
According to the investor Alexey Svirid, “Ukraine has the largest competitive advantages in the two promising fields: IT and agriculture. Agri Eye’s project operates on the boundary of the two, and the idea of the project is innovative for both national and world markets.” The project was included in Top-10 Ukrainian Startups 2016 according to UVCA (Ukrainian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association).
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