Samhitha Crop Care Clinics, an agritech start-up offering precision farming advisory, has raised $1.5 million in a seed round led by TechStar Group, participated by Quadrant Resource and angel investors.
The company plans to leverage these funds to accelerate advisor onboarding and team expansion. The funds will further boost Samhitha’s plan to solve market linkage challenges for the farmers and amplify their profitability.
Founded in 2020, Jagan Chitiprolu, Kalyan Enjamoori, and Dr. Shyamsundar Reddy, Samhitha has pioneered a Digital Tree Health Audit System (DTHAS), a unique method of recording, analysing, and interpreting the health of individual trees in a farm through data, telemetry devices, and Citron app. The DTHAS method helps generate virtual maps delivering a detailed picture of the health status of the orchard, both historically and in real-time.
Speaking on the solutions Samhitha is offering to the farmers, Dr. G. Syamsundar Reddy, CEO, Samhitha Crop Care Clinics said, “With DTHAS and individual tree monitoring, treatment can be limited to affected trees instead of treating the entire orchard. Healthy trees can be given special care to improve productivity, while historical data is maintained for individual trees to assess their performance.”
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Jagan Chitiprolu, Founder, Samhitha said, “In India, agriculture contributes to over 18 per cent to the national GDP (gross domestic products). But over 80 per cent of farmers are small or marginalised. They have limited access to high-end technology, crop experts, and markets. We conceptualised Samhitha with a singular goal – empower agriculture experts with data and insights, who in turn enable farmers to maximise their produce.”
Focused on growth and strategic initiatives, Samhitha has added Saurabh Gupta, Partner at Naviz Analytics and Ram Maruri, Lead India Foundation to their Corporate Advisory Board.
While Samhitha is focused exclusively on citrus growers in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh currently, the company plans to expand its advisory services across India. Samhitha solves the two most critical challenges in precision farming advisory – data-driven advisory on time, and clinical treatment at the individual tree level. Samhitha’s Citron app analyses data points pertaining to soil, weather, and plant to communicate recommendations to the farmers. And with the proprietary data processing engine, the app enables the detection and classification of more than 50 diseases in trees.
Commenting on the traction Samhitha has gained until now, Jagan added, “We conducted a pilot run in the Telangana region, focusing exclusively on citrus growers and identified over 52 on-field defects. Spanning across four lakh trees and 3500 acres, Samhitha enabled farmers to clock over 30 per cent higher yield YOY.”
