Agrix Tech

Millions of small-scale farms in Africa frequently incur huge losses due to diseases and pests that attack their crops and that they are not able to identify. According to thrid-party research data, this situation is getting worse for many years.

As local governments has failed to properly address this problem, the solution that those farmers have adopted is to make cocktails of pesticides and pour it across their fields. This solution is not efficient because it relies only on luck. Moreover, it is dangerous for humans health and environment.

At Agrix Tech, we develop a Plant Doctor App that leverages AI to equip those farmers with crop diseases detection, diagnosis and treatment skills that they lack. It is specially designed to out perform in the african rural environment.

Millions of small-scale farms (farm of less than 2 ha) in Africa usually incur huge losses due to diseases and pests that attack their crops and that they are not able to identify. According to thrid-party research data, aproximately 49% of crops produced by those farmers are lost due to crop diseases and pests. This figures has steadily increased for many years despite the effort of farmers to mitigate it.

As local governments has failed to address this problem, the solution that these farmers have adopted is to make cocktails of many pesticides and pour it across their fields in order save their production. The reason why this solution is not efficient is because it only relies on their luck. Moreover, it is dangerous for humans health and environment.

Our solution is a mobile App that leverages AI to detect crop diseases and propose treatment recommendations to Farmers in many african languages. 

It is very simple to use our app. Below are the three steps to follow:
(1) You select on a image menu your crop type.
(2) You scan with your smartphone camera the suspected plant
(3) The diagnosis and treatment is displayed by the mobile app. You read or listen to the diagnosis and the instruction to treat your plant.

What makes our App stand out are the facts that:
(1) Our App can work offline, allowing farmers who live and work in remote area of Africa with no internet connection to be able to use it.
(2) The AI module of our App can be embedded in third parties' apps thus facilitating its sales by leveraging already existing network of users of the Apps of our partners.

Our product creates value to the small-scale farmers, to our value chain partners (distribution partners) and to society.

Small-scale farmers

Agrix Tech’s primary value proposition is help small-scale farmers to increase their productivity by reducing losses due to crop diseases that usually attack their farms. We achieve that in two ways.

(1)   Treatment : When a disease has already attacked the farm, we explain to the farmer what actions he  should undertake to treat that disease.

(2)   Prevention : When a disease has not attacked the farm yet, we explain to the farmers what actions he should undertake to prevent crop diseases.

Value chain partners (Distribution partners)

Revenues of our value chain partners are positively correleated to the productivity of small-scale farmers who work with them. Hence, beside the commissions that they will receive to distribute our app, they will gain additional revenue deriving from the growth of farmers production.

Society

The additional food production of small-scale farmers will contribute eradicate hunger suffered by some african populations. Also, the additional revenu of small-scale farmers who use our app will substantially contribute to improve the livelihood of their families.

By equiping farming with crop disease detection, dignosis and treatment skills that they lack thanks to our app, we will allow them to increase their yield by up to 100% by reducing pre-harvest losses. We will help them avoid to make use of unnessary harmful pesticides in their fields.

What makes our solution stand out are the facts that:
- our App provides treatment recommendation to farmer in voice messages into their local african languages, allowing any farmer to be able to use it;
- our App can also work offline, allowing farmers who live and work in remote area of Africa with no internet connection to be able to use it;
- the AI module of our App can be embedded in third party apps thus facilitating sales by leveraging already existing network of users of the apps of our Partners.

We implement codes for Convolutional Neural Network (models) to classify diseases that attack different types of crop. Then, we train these models with thousands of images of healthy and unhealthy crops. And finally, we embed these models into an Androïd App by taking advantage of Androïd TensorFlow module which enables trained models to run on Androïd OS.

Demo of our product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXEVpkookHY

Academic papers:
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330214376_Image-Based_Tomato_Leaves_Diseases_Detection_Using_Deep_Learning
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331908447_A_Mobile-Based_Deep_Learning_Model_for_Cassava_Disease_Diagnosis

We help small-scale farmers to improve their farm yields by eliminating pre-harvest losses. By achieving this goal, these farmers considerably increase their revenues thus improve their livelihood and those of people who depend on them.

We currently serves hundreds of farmers in West Cameroon. We aim to serve up to 20,000 farmers by the end of this year. By the end of 2022, we aim to serve up to 500,000 farmers.

Agrix Tech roll out plan is composed of three stages.

Stage 1 (estimated time : 1 year)

We will launch in Cameroon, Ghana and Senegal with help of our value chain partners. Our goal at this stage is to acquire 20,000 early adopters. We will leverage experiences acquired during this stage to improve the quality of our product/service and to deepen our understanding of the market.

Stage 2 (estimated time : 1-2 years)

In this stage, we will grow our customer base by focusing on commodity crops farmers. We will continue to leverage our value chain partners sales channels to expand our customer base. Our goal will be to acquire 500,000 customers. We plan to achieve this goal by entering in large markets such as Ivory-coast, Nigeria, Kenya and Madagascar.

Stage 3 (estimated time : 2-3 years). 

We will further expand our portfolio of crop diseases diagnosis services to cover needs of a wider range of small-scale farmers. We will continue to leverage sales channels of our value chain partners to distribute our product. Our goal will be to acquire 5 millions customers. We will start to sell our insights of african agriculture to organizations operating in the continent.

We lack of finance that could allow us to recruit recruit the full-time employees that we need in order to accelerate the development of our solution.
We need more media exposure in order to develop our brand name. It will trigger more partnership with agricultural companies and thus more sales of our solution.

To overcome these barriers, we raise funds and we give interviews to journalist and bloggers. We participate to business fairs and startup competion in order to meet people who can provide us these opportinities.

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Agrix Tech has seven founding members, whose backgrounds span business development, finance, agriculture management and computer development.

All the seven founding team members works part time on the project.

We also work with 3 organizations which are respectively based in Cameroon, Ghana and Senegal and which are in charge to distribute our solution in their respectives countries.

We are a diverse team with complementary skills. Since the inception of this project 2 years ago we have been resilient to all the challenged that we faced. With a very small finance, we succeded to build an MVP and to create traction for our product.

Our team is composed as it follows:
- Modeste is our CTO. He is a full-stack software developer with more than 13 years of experience. He has already developped softwares used by hundreds of companies.
- Dorothée is a PhD student in crop pathology. At Agrix Tech, she creates and manages educative contents of the App.   
- Jean Marc is a Certified Machine Learning Engineer. At Agrix Tech, he designs and writes all our Artificial Intelligence codes. 
- Willy is a software developer. He has a bachelor degree in software development. At Agrix Tech, he supports Modeste and Jean Marc in software development task.
- Maryben is an agronomists. At Agrix Tech, she develops our network of business contacts in the agricultural sector in Cameroon.
- Landry is an agronomists. At Agrix Tech, he develops our network of business contacts in the agricultural sector in Cameroon.
- And finally, I am the CEO, a Telecom engineer and an MBA graduate from ESMT Berlin.

Hoga Sarl and Farmers Connect are our distribution Partners respectively in Cameroon and Ghana.

Itochu Corporation is a potential distributor of our app. We are still in the early stage of the discussion with them. They want to see the result of our pilot projet in Cameroon before they move forward.

Agromall is a business Customer based in Nigeria which contacted us to buy our solution for its agricultural advisors who works with small-scale Farmers in Nigeria.

Touton is a potential business Customer with whom we are discussing an Opportunity to run a proof of concept with their cocoa Farmers in Ghana.

Our business model is B2B2C. We leverage distribution channels of local partners to reach our end users. In some case, we customize our generic Plant Doctor App with our partners colors & logo before handing it to them for sales. It allows us to leverage name recognition of those partners in communities where they already operate. Our partners keep 10-35% revenue of sales revenues as commission to motivate them to accept the deal.

We lack of finance that could allow us to recruit recruit the full-time employees that we need in order to accelerate the development of our solution.
We need more media exposure in order to develop our brand name. It will trigger more partnerships with agricultural companies and thus more sales of our solution.

We need to partner with some organization to facilitate the distribution of our solution. These organizations can be:
- Agricultural loan companies;
- Farmers' organizations;
- Commodity crop traders.

While distributing our product, these organizations gain many benefits. Beside a commission that they gain on the sales revenue our app generated through their channel, they also have indirect benefit because their revenues are positively correleted to small-scale farmers productivity they work with.

We develop an App that leverages AI to equip small-scale farmers in Africa with crop diseases detection, diagnosis & treatment  skills that they lack. And, about 60% of labour force in african agriculture are women.

We develop an App that leverages AI to equip small-scale farmers with crop diseases detection, diagnosis & treatment  skills that they lack.
We will use the prize to increase our dataset of crop images used to train our machine learning models.