Instacrops will demo its water-saving, crop-boosting AI at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025
Agriculture is a thirsty industry, Consuming 70% of all fresh water used worldwide. In some countries, such as India or Chile, it can be more than 90%.
For Mario Bustamante, who lives in Chile, the problem comes close to home. “Lack of water is a big problem here,” he said WAN.
Bustamante gambles that AI can help to lower water use in farms around the world. His startup, Instacrops, was originally set up to use internet-of-things (IoT) sensors on farms to warn farmers about harmful frost conditions, but as the hardware was constructed, the company turned in software and water use.
Now Instacrops helps 260 farms to reduce their water use to 30%, while it also increases the crop yields by no less than 20%. The company is part of Startup Battlefield and will be presented in San Francisco later this month at WAN Disrupt.
The switch from hardware to AI turned the company upside down, allowing it to work with fewer staff and during the processing of more data.
“We process – more or less – 15 million data points per hour. Almost 10 years ago that was the amount for a year,” said Bustamante. “We lower the costs, team members and generate more impact with less.”
Instacrops can install new IoT sensors or connect to the existing network of a farm and collect data from them to advise farmers to irrigate different areas. The LLM models of the startup absorb more than 80 parameters, including soil moisture, moisture, temperature, pressure, crop yield and NDVI, a plant productivity metricity derived from satellite images.
Those advice is sent to farmers’ mobile phones. Instacrops offers a chatbot app, but it also integrates with WhatsApp. “I think we will be 100% WhatsApp in the following year because it is a universal tool for every farmer,” said Bustamante
On farms that are more technologically advanced, Instacrop’s irrigation systems can arrange directly, he said.
Instacrops focuses on high-quality crops in Latin America, including apples, avocados, blueberries, almonds and cherries. Farmers pay an annual reimbursement per hectare of agricultural land to access the irrigation insights of the startup.
The startup was part of the Y combinator Summer 2021 BatchAnd it has received investments from SVG Ventures and Genesis Ventures.
If you want to know more about Instacrops and dozens of other startups, live and personal, Mass WAN do not disrupt, which takes place from 27 to 29 October in San Francisco.
