Fasal is an AI-powered IoT platform for precision agriculture.

Fasal is an AI-powered IoT platform for precision agriculture. It delivers insights and analytics to farmers to grow more and better.

Funding raised: Friends and family: $45,ooo, Zeroth.ai pre-seed funding: $120,000

The Fasal team installing the device at a farm.

Traditionally, farming has been the result of powerful intuitions and insights gained by the farmer over years. However, with the havoc caused on the land due to environmental degradation and climate change, even die-hard sons-of-soil today need assistance.

Fasal, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered IoT platform, removes the guesswork and manual methods of most farmers today who are working in isolation to make critical crop related decisions by providing them with data and analytics to grow better.

Twenty-eight-year-old Ananda Verma, Co-founder of Fasal, says that in his interactions with farmers, he has seen that often there’s poor utilisation of significant resources. The produce is also plagued by multiple diseases, one of the biggest pain points of the farmers. The startup also predicts threat assessment of diseases, thus helping farmers approach the problem through prevention instead of reaction.

IoT and ML to the rescue

Ananda belongs to a farming family from Azamgarh near Varanasi and has seen his father lose his crop because of uncertain weather prediction and lack of information. “And this problem is not only with him but every farmer faces the same issue of lack of data point to make a decision,” he adds.

After graduating from IIIT Bangalore, and working in the IT software industry for more than five years, Ananda realised he could solve this problem of guesswork using tech advancement in IoT and Machine Learning (ML).

This fusion of agriculture and engineering led him to start Fasal with his Co-founder Shailendra Tiwari. “We worked together for a couple of years and he was my product manager and I was his engineering lead,” Ananda says. Shailendra, 27, comes from a product management background, having graduated in Industrial Engg from NIFT.

On-ground successes 

Grover-Zampa, one of the largest vineyards in India, is Fasal’s customer. Ananda claims that they have saved money in reactive sprays and improved the quality of wine grapes significantly by controlling water stress level with Fasal’s technology.

“One of the influential vegetable farmers in Durg came to know that he has been irrigating excessively in his farm where water is a scarcity. He is now saving 50 percent on irrigation cost,” says Ananda describing how Fasal’s tech is helping on the ground