In FERN’s latest story, published with WIRED, reporter Stephen Robert Miller unpacks the story of Plantix, an app that promised to change the lives of poor farmers in places like India and Africa by allowing them to instantly diagnose disease and pests in their crops. But as the company grew, supported by venture capital funding, the mission changed.
As Miller writes, “It’s 2016, and Simone Strey looks giddy. In the video, a clip from a series titled “Innovators Under 35: Germany,” the agritech entrepreneur awkwardly explains the challenge of jumping into the business side of the startup world. “We are all more from science,” she says in her German-accented English. But she and her team of coders, anthropologists, botanists, and plant pathologists had struck on something unique. Something potentially very big.
“Flash forward to 2019, and Strey has mounted a London stage before a sparse audience of private investors looking for the next big thing in agritech …
“In the years between pitches, Plantix had begun a journey toward becoming one of the world’s most successful digital tools for agriculture, serving more than 30 million farmers who upload some 50,000 images to the platform a day.
“But by the time Strey faced those investors in London, she was describing a very different vision for Plantix. No longer did she speak about saving the environment or using fewer chemicals. Now, she said, ‘We want to start a revolution in the agri-supply chain.’
“This subtle shift spoke volumes about what was happening behind the scenes. During the three intervening years, Strey and her team had reshaped Plantix from a tool they hoped would help reduce global pesticide use into an app that would make it easier for farmers to buy pesticides. What Strey left out of her pitch was that developing such powerful AI is expensive, and Plantix was in stiff competition with other agritech startups for limited funding from venture capital investors who wanted surefire profit. A brilliant idea beautifully executed wasn’t enough to win them over — Plantix would have to recast itself into something purpose-built for fast capital.”