ThinkAg NEWS: Message from the CEO for the year gone by at ThinkAg and Welcoming new members!

It is a great pleasure to share with you all in this year-end message the achievements of ThinkAg over these last 12 months.

Our stated objective at ThinkAg is to be India’s first agritech platform bringing together Innovators, Corporates and Investors to improve outcomes in Indian Food and Agriculture.

Our newsletter which is now just over a year old is our primary medium to reach out to all our readers in the sector sharing with them a mix of news of ThinkAg’s activities and how these are geared to address the broader issues that concern the sector.

ThinkAg’s activities revolve around building the ecosystem for F&A from workshops through its AgLab series like the one held for the NSW government introducing their startups to Indian investors to addressing specific issues through its AgClinic series like the one on Value Chain Finance. Through both these mediums, we have endeavoured to build strong and lasting partnerships with our members and the community at large and bring to the forefront many interesting and path-breaking solutions that are currently being worked on or are in implementation by various Innovators. Research is also a key to our strategy and the report we have jointly authored with Rabo bank on the availability of finance for agritech, as well as our Investment report in the state of agritech funding in the country, is a precursor to our desire to support our members with a full research capability to answer their questions.

Our focus has been on 5 core areas which we believe are critical to building a strong and sustainable ecosystem for food and agriculture: supply chain optimisation, Finance and Risk Mitigation, Food waste reduction, NextGen nutrition and Smart production. 

In these areas, the last 12 months have seen us cast a spotlight on many interesting and innovative stories of innovators working tirelessly to resolve some of the most complex issues that face the Agritech industry today. Some examples:

In Finance and Risk Mitigation: Dvara’s work with smartphones to provide seamless financial inclusion to farmers in rural India; Satsure’s endeavours in Agri banking and insurance to provide farmers with access to much-needed finance for buying agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilisers and pesticides; 

Credible’s risk mitigation model developed to predict short term commodity price Prediction that can be used by multiple players across the value chain; PayAgri’s end to end agri value chain Finance model that built products that helped small farmers and FPOsFarMart is a platform that helps smallholder farmers get access to low-cost digital credit by linking credit to inputs purchase at the point of sale.

In Supply Chain Optimisation: Srinivasa Farms innovative approach to to building a scalable business through their incubator Ida Hatch; Agrix’s path-breaking mission to create low cost and easy to use products that can simplify transactions across the agriculture supply chain; AgriRain’s Irrigation as a service model (IaaS) that provides solutions to save water and increase productivity;

In Next Gen Nutrition: Good Food’s drive for transformative innovation in the global protein sector to seek an answer to the daunting question - How are we going to feed 9.7 billion people globally by 2050;

In Smart Production: Gramaphone’s effort to bridge the last mile delivery of agronomically driven solutions and products in a form which is actionable for a farmer

In Food Waste Reduction: Tan90 Solutions research to organise a cold chain in the primary and tertiary segments of the food chain.

In Smart Farming: Gramaphone’s effort to bridge the last mile delivery of agronomically driven solutions and products in a form which is actionable for a farmer. Farmguide’s incredible agri platform that monitors 12 cr farms and 30+ crops using image processing algorithms and providing a dedicated information service to over 26 lakh farmers 

As we move to the new year the hope is to share many more such exciting innovations with our readers and through our programs create a dynamic and engaging ecosystem for them to interact with each other to help resolve the issues that concern us all.

Some of the new initiatives we plan to introduce in the new year :

A full-fledged mentorship program where we plan to invite senior members from the industry to work with innovators to advise and help build sustainable solutionsA dedicated team of partnership managers as part of the ThinkAg platform who will be responsible for individual client portfolios on an end to end basis;The AgLab events to be focussed around topical issues concerning the sector such as IoT, Food tech, Farm to Consumer and Smart Fields. These events will be curated as panel discussions with experienced practitioners from the industry participating and sharing their views.The AgClinic events which will be open to members only will revolve around our 5 focus areas designed to engage partners to discuss and evolve solutions. 

And lots more…2020 promises to be an exciting year for us at ThinkAg and we look forward to your continued and active participation at our events as well as share with us your stories for our newsletters so that other members may benefit from your experiences.

Lastly, we want to welcome the Dayal Group as our latest member of the ThinkAg platform.

Dayal Group, a diversified agribusiness group headquartered in Meerut, founded in 1979, and offering a comprehensive range of agricultural inputs such as plant fertilisers and nutrients, animal feeds and supplements and seeds. The group has distribution facilities across several states of India. We are excited to have the Dayal Group join our network and support their vision to accelerate with new-age technologies.

As 2019 ends, I wish all our readers Season’s Greetings and look forward to engaging with you in 2020.