Less than 1 percent of startups in the world are funded by venture capital, yet venture remains the focus for many seeking to advance innovation. Today’s guest is a veteran of the venture capital community and is here to shed more light on the role of venture and share a few tips for startups and big companies alike. Ting Gootee, CEO of TechPoint, joins us to talk capital connectivity in startups, big companies investing to create strategic product consolidation and how the venture community is evolving in the Midwest at large.
Ting also talks about investor interest in agbioscience and driving momentum using the customer voice. As the past Chief Investment Officer at Elevate Ventures, she lays out quick tips for entrepreneurs getting ready to make their first pitch including and how to create an “aha” moment rather than a “so what” moment. Ting also lays out for big companies the benefits of working with startups and entrepreneurs to expand their portfolio of solutions and looks ahead at agtech and its acceleration in Indiana.
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Croft streamlines the H-2A process, saving farms, their H-2A agents and recruiters, and workers time, money, and hassle
Croft Technology, Inc., the agribusiness workforce platform backed by Purdue University DIAL Ventures and High Alpha Innovation, has onboarded its first H-2A workers in Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, and Indiana. In 2023, Croft will eliminate paperwork and manual H-2A processes, while increasing worker success, to help labor-intensive farms increase profit across the country.
Labor takes up to 40% of a specialty crop farm’s operating budget, and this number is only increasing. Today, over 12,000 farms in the U.S. rely on the H-2A visa program to fill labor gaps. Croft digitizes worker data and automates onboarding steps and labor management workflows, leading to decreased back-office costs, faster worker ramp-up, and more accurate records for automated form filing and audits.
“Croft’s subscription-based online software is easy for our workers and staff to understand and use. There’s no more waiting around to fill out forms or lines of workers,” said Courtney Hamilton Griffin, Director of Operational Support, Southern Valley Fruit & Vegetable, Inc.
Next up, Croft is adding functionality that helps workers connect with jobs that will increase their success. The resulting productivity gains will have a significant impact on worker satisfaction leading to profitability, enabling farmers to do more with fewer resources.
“Helping H-2A farms and their partners digitally collaborate to streamline labor processes is just the start. Once workers onboard in Croft, we can set them up for success with the right jobs and crews,” said Scott Prince, CEO, Croft. “Croft is helping growers and their partners reach their profit margin goals.”
Croft’s innovative platform has far-reaching implications for the agricultural ecosystem. Employers, their H-2A agents and recruiters, and workers will benefit from digitally collaborating for the first time for more efficient and cost-effective hiring workflows. Longer term, the move towards digitization enables farmers with actionable business intelligence, providing them with valuable real-time data and insights to make faster strategic decisions about their operations.
The labyrinth of navigating foreign worker programs is one that is navigated by many … including many here in agbioscience. It’s a dizzying maze of service providers, forms, agencies and advisors, and it’s a system that a new startup connected to Purdue University is seeking to improve. Today we welcome agtech company Croft founder and CEO Scott Prince.
Scott is no stranger to startups. He gets into his passion for starting and growing businesses, what Croft aims to solve through innovation and what it would mean for the challenge to go un-solved. Farms struggle to find seasonal talent to help their operations run efficiently and Scott dives into the H2A program, the experience for the farm operator and the employee and how this streamlined option creates better trusting work relationships on both sides.
So why does an IU grad get into a venture studio at Purdue University? Scott gets into the go-to-market resources and opportunity to collaborate with a base of professionals that allow them to accelerate quickly and optimize their product. He also talks Indiana’s agtech ecosystem and what’s ahead for Croft.
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Technology to support corn and soybean field monitoring
Intelinair and Eiwa today announced that they have entered into a multi-year research collaboration and distribution agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Eiwa will license drone analytic technology of corn and soybean fields from Intelinair on Eiwa Vault’s analytics library, for the benefit of Eiwa’s research customers in the United States and South America. The technology will help monitor and assess early season corn and soybean fields.
“Through this agreement, Eiwa users in the United States and South America will be able to use our drone analytics not just in commercial farms, but also in research plot applications,” says Intelinair Global Business Leader Orlando Saez. “Eiwa has strict specifications for corn and soybean plant height and counts across research plots and on-farm trials. We are excited our analytics have been extensively tested to satisfy the accuracy needed under a wide range of field conditions in less time to increase enterprise value for our customers.”
Carlos Hirsch, CRO for Eiwa, says, “This marks an important new phase for Eiwa and its customers, as we open our Analytics Library to also offer analytics from the best providers in the industry. Through this collaboration with Intelinair, we can provide our customers worldwide with a broader and more comprehensive drone analytic offering from a market leader directly from our Eiwa Vault platform. We hope this is only the beginning of a long and successful partnership.”
Other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
gBETA is a free, seven-week accelerator for early-stage companies with local roots. Each program is capped at five teams, and requires no fees and no equity.
Purdue alumni founders’ goal is for users to collectively become the largest farm in the world without owning any land
A startup company founded by Purdue University alumni has received funding from the state of Indiana to advance the manufacture of its products.
Heliponix LLC, doing business as anu™ (previously gropod®), has received a $200,000 Indiana Manufacturing Readiness Grants (MRG) award to mass manufacture its aeroponic seed pod consumables.
Manufacturing Readiness Grants are provided by the Indiana Economic Development Corp. and administered by Conexus Indiana and the Next Level Manufacturing Institute. They are available to Indiana manufacturers willing to make capital investments to integrate smart technologies and processes that improve capacity, productivity and competitiveness. Launched in 2020, the MRG program has supported tech-enabled investment in smart manufacturing all around the state.
Anu, founded by Purdue Polytechnic Institute alumni Scott Massey and Ivan Ball, sells a smart garden appliance. The small, fully automated, in-home greenhouse grows daily servings of produce from subscription seed pods.
Aeroponics is a form of hydroponics, or growing plants without soil. Massey said the pods empower consumers to grow fresh, high-quality produce including most leafy green vegetables, culinary herbs, ornamental/flowering plants and an increasing number of fruiting plant varieties such as peppers, tomatoes and more in a controlled environment.
“Our cultivation chambers use deep-learning, computer-vision algorithms to produce higher yields than other controlled-environment agriculture technology,” Massey said. “The chambers consume less energy and more than 95 percent less water than conventional field farming. With zero use of pesticides or preservatives, they represent an environmentally friendly solution for year-round accelerated growing.”
Massey said the funding will allow anu to scale a sustainable platform for consumers by supplying growers with recurring seed pod subscriptions.
“This funding has dramatically increased our ability to manufacture these seed pods, but in a volume that will quickly outpace the collective yields of the largest farms in the world,” Massey said. “It further accelerates our pursuit to collectively become the largest farm in the world without owning any land.”
Mitch Landess, vice president of innovation and digital transformation at Conexus Indiana, said manufacturing entrepreneurship, especially when it involves technology, is vital for Indiana.
“Small firms founded and led by entrepreneurs that leverage the resources around them and form credible partnerships are interesting to the Manufacturing Readiness Grants program,” Landess said. “The mix of intellectual property, local venture capital, Small Business Innovation Research funding and participation of larger manufacturing partners made it easy to support anu’s investment in production technology.”
Conexus Indiana recently named Massey to the Conexus Indiana Rising 30 Class of 2023, which recognizes distinguished advanced manufacturing and logistics professionals under the age of 30.
Massey said he and his colleagues at anu appreciate support from Conexus for the Rising 30 recognition and from the IEDC for the $200,000 Manufacturing Readiness Grants award.
“It was only a few years ago that I was a Purdue University student with an idea and the drive to bring it to the market — to empower everyone to grow their own produce. Conexus has done a phenomenal job extending these resources and recognition to make this idea a reality as we continue growing our highly experienced team, creating jobs and attracting more talent to the great state of Indiana,” Massey said.
“Indiana’s support for small businesses is not just unparalleled, but Indiana’s long-standing history of advanced manufacturing has resulted in it being the best possible headquarter base for us.”
There will be more than 13,000 job openings annually across the U.S. for data scientists until 2031 – that’s according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics who also shares the median wages for those jobs will be more than 100,000 dollars. These numbers are big and they are across agbioscience. Dr. Sofia Brandariz Zerboni, Senior Data Scientist with Bayer, joins us to share her perspective on the opportunity and new partnerships making data science more accessible to companies and students across the Midwest.
Sofia talks about data science informing better decision making, Bayer’s approach to innovation and the average day of a data scientist in agbioscience. She gets into the company’s partnership with The Data Mine at Purdue University and enabling students from various backgrounds to understand the application of data science in the agbioscience. Diving into data making a better world, Sofia shares her advice for young people considering their career and agbioscience being a good fit for them.
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Rankings are important. They provide a quick measure of relative strength, but sometimes the story of how those rankings were made possible are lost. Today’s guest has invested more than three decades delivering the work to make rankings like #3 college of agriculture in North America and #1 Agricultural and Biological Engeering graduate program a reality. He’s a great partner for agbioscience innovators and he is the new Dean of the Purdue University College of Agriculture — Dr. Bernie Engel.
Bernie gets into Purdue’s growth story in the years he’s served at the university, their big focus on driving innovation and entrepreneurship and looking beyond agbioscience in the College of Agriculture. He talks about his deep connection to engineering, Purdue’s unique strength in partnerships and bringing those together to grow and accelerate meaningful connections.
How will Purdue continue working to meet the talent needs of a growing agbioscience industry? Bernie gets into the sector’s pace of change and helping students to adapt to that as they enter the workforce. He also talks about Purdue’s innovation portfolio, research paving the way for it to happen and what’s ahead at Purdue University’s College of Agriculture.
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Intelinair announced today a multi-year collaboration agreement with Solvi to further expand its AGMRI platform by providing corn and soybean growers proven and reliable stand counts for the early crop growth stages.
“By combining our suite of drone image collection and analytics with Solvi’s advanced plant-counting algorithms, our new service will further expand our offering in plant population inspections,” said Tim Hassinger, CEO and President of Intelinair. “Through this collaboration, we can provide timely and highly accurate stand counts via the TrueCause™ drone scouting tool on anything from research plots to large operations.”
The following principles have been applied to Intelinair’s expanded offering:
Data-mined. TrueCause™ intelligent drone mission planning and stand count visualization taps Solvi’s AI-powered image classification models that quickly analyze large, complex datasets. These algorithms recognize and predict plant architecture patterns for fast, reliable insights.
Accurate. Plant Count models were trained on corn and soybean fields to recognize geolocated crop nuances, especially in critical early growth crop stages, supporting most planting configurations, including twin rows.
Relevant. The system delivers the actual stand for yield potential, as well as predicting replant units needed in a timely manner for replanting seeding prescriptions.
“Our Plant Counts tool, powered by PlantAI™, accurately identifies, counts, and classifies acres of plant shapes from done images in minutes,” said Igor Tihonov, CEO of Solvi. “While the technology behind the scenes uses sophisticated AI algorithms exclusively trained on thousands of agricultural images, Intelinair’s user interface simplifies the entire process for complex workflows or large commercial operations.”
For more information on how to simplify plant counting or to schedule a demonstration, go to Intelinair.com or email [email protected].
