MIT Solve

Solution overview

Our Solution

SatSure

Tagline

Helping farmers in developing countries access finance by giving banks, policy-makers, and insurance companies digital data infrastructure.

Pitch us on your solution

SatSure's vision is to be a leader in technology and business model innovation for enabling successful implementation of sustainability initiatives, especially financial inclusion of farmers in developing countries. By creating solutions that lie at the convergence of satellite image analytics, cloud computing, Big Data, and artificial intelligence, SatSure aims to build decision intelligence that guides stakeholders towards actionable interventions.
This requires tremendous amount of synchronisation of technology and business plans to generate data, whose asymmetry is the root cause of the poor rate of successful sustainability projects in developing markets. Utilizing the large area monitoring capabilities of satellites, SatSure has constantly innovated in simplifying delivery by creating bespoke products and commoditizing data. By 2030 it is expected that 85% of the world's population will be in developing countries, thus it is critical that we build solutions to solve the developing world's problems.

What is the problem you are solving?

SatSure is a technology platform company, with its solutions designed at the intersection of the sustainability nexus of food, water, and energy security for the other 3 billion. Only in India, a country with a population of 1.4 billion and 55% of its workforce employed in the agriculture sector, over 150 million+ rural farmers do not have access to institutional credit and only about 20% farmers are covered by crop insurance. As the effects of climate change become more prominent with frequent droughts and natural catastrophes, investment in agriculture technology has to be complemented with investments in the financial services and policy making approach that support agriculture as improved credit flows and well designed crop insurance plays an important role in increasing the farmer's potential to earn and invest in sustainable agriculture practices. SatSure's decision intelligence solutions that span across agriculture, energy, and infrastructure sectors aims to address the above problems, especially in developing countries which have dubious data quality, by designing solutions that helps in planning, monitoring, and implementation of projects towards financial inclusion, sustainable development, and climate action.

Who are you serving?

Farmers in developing countries are one of the fastest adopters of mobile phones enabling access to digital services that were earlier impossible. SatSure's vision to enable the financial inclusion of farmers from remotest regions of developing countries is by enabling organizations such as banks, insurers, and policy makers with capacity, intelligence and outreach to service these farmer. All these beneficiary organisations primarily have been using indirect datasets like personal data, collateral data, demographic data to define financial policies and credit-worthiness pertaining to agriculture sector. Also, banks and governments have traditionally relied on a large number of field staff to obtain basic agricultural information and monitor agricultural assets, leading to a lack of data standardization, authenticity, accuracy and frequent delays. And such loan management practices were majorly due to lack of any alternate solution that can work at large spatial scales. Hence, SatSure's solutions are empowering all the people associated in this credit cycle - starting from the credit policy makers, bank's lead generation staff, field staff who onboard farmers and perform collections operations, credit underwriters, and eventually the farmers who have better chances to get loans for their crops at the right time.

What is your solution?

Enabling farmer financial inclusion demands working with multiple large and small organisations, both public and private, engaged in agricultural credit lending and policymaking.

SatSure works in a B2B and B2G model, building the product through a customer engagement approach.

The basic tenet of SatSure's crop intelligence product suite is the idea of creating digital twins of farmlands by mimicking crop growth parameters through proxy indices generated using satellite remote sensing, both in near real-time and historical patterns.

However, information such as climatic data, local market arrival rates, crop pricing, land ownership, customer payment behavior, and irrigation is needed by lenders for a 360-degree view on credit decisions, lead generation, and collections planning. This data is addressed through agreements - both commercial and partnerships with AgTech and FinTech firms.

Correlation between these data points, modeling the cropping cycle, while converting scientific information into simple financial data that is easy to understand and consume for the end-users at banks, governments, insurance, and microfinance agencies are addressed though SatSure's product.

A phased implementation with banks by integrating with their loan lifecycle management process is the first step towards unlocking the economies of scale through addition of more number of farmers who have been previously unaddressed or addressed but with a poorly designed loan and insurance products due to unavailability of quality data for underwriting.

SatSure's solutions are easy to implement across geographies since, primary input comes from satellite image analytics, and a large part of growth would be to replicate the success of India to SEA and Africa.

Select only the most relevant.

Create or advance equitable and inclusive economic growth

Where is your solution team headquartered?

Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India

Our solution's stage of development:

Prototype

More about your solution

Describe what makes your solution innovative.

The competitive advantages that SatSure has over its competitors are as laid below:
Proprietary Technology built through deep expertise of the team and exclusive working relationships with users, data partners, and a Business Model that has carefully woven barriers to entry for competition and created multiple re-use and recycling of its input data and products, and geographies in which it is operating, where land holdings are small and there exists high diversity in crop management practices and agro-climatic zones, with very poor data infrastructure.
There are a few other organizations like CropIn, Farmguide, Harvesting, and Skymet which are addressing the same future of work challenges, but come with very distinct approaches. For example, CropIn has been in FarmERP business since 2011 while SatSure started operations in 2017 with a focus on satellite image analytics, making the data extraction of farms highly scalable and independent of manual site visits.

Describe the core technology that your solution utilizes.

SatSure leverages the following technologies -
Big Data systems and cloud computing to manage heavy workloads and deliver consistent service levels to the clients
Satellite image processing for extracting trends on crop parameters like health, moisture, sowing and harvest progress, and crop area through image classification process
Computer Vision - to scale the image processing without loss in accuracy of the outputs
Artificial Intelligence is used extensively to study patterns that can be pulled through the satellite image trends, and find relationships with other datasets

Thus, SatSure is bringing ground agricultural and weather data and converting it to decision intelligence delivered through an online digital dashboard and mobile app to it's clients. With increased digital penetration, the reach of banking services increases which leads to increased inbound credit queries. To cater to these requirements of first time borrowers with no official credit history, requires digitalisation of agricultural and geospatial data, which is what SatSure does through its large area analytics solutions.

How many people are you currently serving with your solution? How many will you be serving in one year? How about in five years?

As mentioned, SatSure works indirectly to help farmers enter the financial ecosystem.
A banking client used SatSure's product across 20% of it's portfolio one cropping season in India. Within a season, the bank was able to provide 84,000 farm loans across 5 states. It enabled the bank with sales and recoveries of approximately INR 3000 Crore (USD 400 Million)
As per MasterCard Foundation's independent report, one of SatSure's banking clients was able to increase it's book size by 2% and reduce the NPAs by 1.5% in agriculture, within a year.

What are your goals within the next year and within the next five years?

The metrics used to measure the success at SatSure are:
Number of new loans enabled
Size of the portfolio monitored for banks
No of interventions created for the farmers
Happiness of customers

SatSure's top three goals for next year are:
Build products handling end- to -end business cycle with geospatial intelligence across agriculture, infrastructure and energy verticals
Expand its footprint and operations globally and rapidly
Work on the interaction design of the products to inculcate the cultural differences that dictate their usability.

What are the barriers that currently exist for you to accomplish your goals for the next year and for the next five years?

Internal Risks: Based on 7S model, SatSure recognizes 3 areas with internal risks.
Strategy: So far Government organisations were major revenue drivers for SatSure. SatSure has had more than 1000% growth rate which though good, also adds risks to the business.
Staff: SatSure being a small start up and asset light, the increased business growth has equivalent pressure on the team to deliver, which can affect the deliveries to clients. Increasing staff strategically based on business pipleline will help manage the risk.
Skills: To operate in the industry, SatSure needs human resources with a combination of diverse and niche skill sets like agriculture, remote sensing, financial industry etc. which is not easy to find. Skill development and capacity building is essential to manage the risk.
External Risks: Based on PESTEL model, SatSure has recognized the following as risks:
Political: All the three major industry touchpoints of SatSure's business - agriculture, space, and financial services, are heavily influenced by political events
Legal: Space industry is strictly governed by laws set by individual countries. Any major change in the laws governing usage of satellite data can affect the industry. Also, data privacy and cloud security have emerged as issues that we need to take care of on a case by case basis, depending on the geography of operation.

How are you planning to overcome these barriers?

SatSure's business strategy is to increase the revenue share from private companies to mitigate the risk posed by current reliance on revenue from governments.
Diversification across geography helps mitigate the external risks both in terms of legal and political scenario.

About your team

Your business model & funding

Partnership potential