April 5, 2019

India’s Intello Labs has raised $2 million in Seed funding from Nexus Venture Partners and Omnivore.

Founded in 2016 by Milan Sharma, Nishant Mishra, Himani Shah, and Devendra Chandani, Intello Labs brings together artificial intelligence, vision technology, and deep learning to build a platform that can assess and monitor the quality of agricultural crops.

Delivered through a smartphone app, Intello Labs provides a visual solution that surpasses the widespread manual inspections carried out today. And its team hopes it will become the go-to quality assessment platform throughout the agricultural value chain, bringing transparency to trading, procurement, marketing, and pricing.

Currently working with potatoes, onions, wheat, tomatoes, and select spices, Intello earns revenue through charging clients per photo of batches of produce. The app then analyzes and grades each photo for factors such as cracks, skin imperfections, and shriveling, identifying pest damage in commodities, or pod sizes in spices.

“In the current process, if you are to send a sample to a laboratory for testing, it takes around US$40 to US$50,” Milan Sharma, CEO of Intello Labs, told Tech in Asia. “We are much, much cheaper than that.”

The startup claims that its technology runs at a 95 percent accuracy rate, outperforming the accuracy of human inspection processes, and has the ability to lower inspection times by 13 minutes, to two minutes.

“Currently, there are two major ways that [inspection is] done. The first is manual inspection: a sample is drawn, and it’s inspected manually, which leads to subjectivity, lack of manpower, and scaling issues,” said Sharma. “The second way is laboratories, which are geographically constrained, very high on cost, and the volume that they can get is limited.”

Having this ability to objectively measure and grade the quality of food and crops will translate into higher prices for farmers when dealing with traders, who typically make offers with discounts built-in given the assumption of quality issues.

However, visual measurements are just the beginning for Intello Labs, which envisions a future where additional factors such as protein, gluten, or moisture content can be measured with the same ease and accuracy.

This is the third agtech investment round for Omnivore in about as many weeks, after the fund led a $2 million Seed round along with Blume Ventures and BEENEXT for Indian agtech and robotics platform TartanSense, and a pre-Series A round along online agribusiness platform DeHaat, which is based in Gurugram, India. Omnivore sees its participation in the round for Intello Labs as backing technology that answers to a long-standing challenge.

“For years, Omnivore has been searching for an agritech startup disrupting the opaque and subjective system of commodity grading in India, which hurts the entire value chain, especially farmers,” Mark Khan, partner at Omnivore told Agfunder. “Intello Labs will bring transparency and objectivity across agribusiness supply chains, helping farmers to capture the value they create.”

-Lynda Kiernan