How Cropin CEO Krishna Kumar grew Cropin to $63M revenue and 185 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is krishna kumar he's the founder and ceo of crop and technology solutions he's made it possible to enable data-driven farming by connecting all the stakeholders in the agri ecosystem cropping is a leading global full stack ag tech organization that provides sas solutions thus enabling businesses to utilize technology to effectively drive their initiatives around digitization predictability risk management compliance sustainability and traceability all right uh krishna are you ready to take it to the top sure all right very good so tell us specifically uh what the company does and what's your revenue model how do you make money yeah so you know cropping is a full stack active company and uh we work with b2b we are sas b2b company and we work with all the businesses who are interacting with the farmer for their business uh for example we work with uh companies who are into farm farm production like mccain itc philip morris syngenta we also work the input side of the businesses who are trying to sell chemicals and fertilizers to pharma where they want to manage the pharma from the advisory perspective and also from the from managing the retailers and dealers point of view so one side we are managing helping the companies to help them to grow better with a less less input providing all kinds of advisory support to the farm at the same time we also helping input companies to educate the farmer how to use their inputs in a better way the third piece is uh we also work with the banks and uh nbfcs and insurance companies to underwrite their product because you know lately what we saw in 2015 that we are sitting on a huge amount of data the critical mass of data it was like close to 88 terabyte of data we thought how can we learn from this data and give back the insight back to the customer and also to their farmers and we build a lot of machine learning ai based capability to uh you know provide this inside the real time to the customer to make sense of it and also help the farmer to grow better so so who's your actual customer who's paying for the technology i think businesses who are paying for the technology the farmer or what kind of business no so the customers who are engaging the businesses are paying for the money for example if you look at mccain mccain does potato growing for their chips making they engage in the background a lot of farmers to grow the potato so but the company will pay our uh pay to us but they will use our platform to manage their 100 000 growers in different countries i see yeah i see okay very good so mccain you've also got like sudra uh uh how do you say s sayadri farms these kind of companies okay very good and then what do they pay on average for this per month i'm sure you have a lot of cohorts but on average what would you put it at so if you look at our international international customers peers on an average of you know fifty thousand dollars some customers are 100k 200k uh dollars also you said 50 000 per year but yeah on an average if i you know divide the international businesses by the revenue and if you look at indian businesses there are somewhere around 13 000 on on an average but again there are customers who are at the enterprise level paying more more than that okay when you look at if you put your income including domestic and foreign all together though it sounds like the average might be around 15 16 17 000 per year or something like that uh you can see that or or is the cohort is the indian cohort that's paying 13 000 bucks a year is that of those are not the make it's a very different cohort than your international correct so if you look at internationally is much higher uh and then the domestic is uh on the lower side okay so when did you launch the company what year so we started in 2010 uh much much earlier than it's the you know arctic started in the industry so we will we started talking about in 2010 we launched our first working product in end of 2011 starting of 2012 then we started selling to the customer and what were you i mean how did you get into this did you quit a corporate job and then go on or were you a farmer and then said i want to build this yeah so so i was a corporate i used to work with the ge general electrics uh i was hardcore engineer uh more of a rnd guy and then you know one of the idea was to do of my something of my own give back to the society whatever learned from we have learned from it and we learn technology so we thought what we best we can do and also i was looking for a sector which really needs technology where nobody wants to invest their time and culture came to the first because a lot of farmers take their life because of you know take their life because of the debt and the crop failures uh and and the debt is somewhere around you know thousand dollar for that somebody takes life that's a big so a thousand dollars in debt and the rates of suicide are extremely high okay correct and then the yields are very low and i thought like you know there is no such platform which is actually bringing this whole ecosystem closer where you can remove the information as symmetry and provide all the right advisory to the farmer right from the advisory and also financial product to them so that they can expect more and become a better farmer have enough cash flow to you know do experiments and and help their family as well so if that our strategy is not only to help them to grow better but also we are helping banks and insurance companies to reach out to this farmer provide you know data insights to them that you can actually go and lend this pharma because he has been a very good farmer from last three years opening up the black box for them and and held them to underwrite a loan and also bringing down the cost of monitoring and underwriting for the bank so that it becomes a viable business for them banks paying you for this correct okay so it's a different revenue stream okay so it's basically it's a mostly a machine learning and ai based system which when the banks try to give lend to a farmer sorry i totally get the product i'm just trying to get a sense of how meaningful is in your business so just the revenue from banks like how much of your total revenue over the past 12 months doesn't make up like 10 150 percent close to ten percent okay ten percent okay so small but it sounds like growing got it talk to me about talk to me about your key kind of your key growth which it sounds like are the kind of mccains of the world right so how many how many companies like that are you working with now today so we have worked with close to 185 companies across the globe so we are in 29 countries mostly our target customers are enterprise and once we acquire them we go to multiple countries where they are working with the farmers and they onboard the farmers on the platform so uh the strategies to go to the enterprise first and then to the mid-sized market yep now can i can i take 185 customers multiplied by that 50 000 acv that puts you guys at about 9 10 million bucks in run rate right now is that about right so you can call it as a 4.5 million error we are targeting because some customers will be on the pilot stage and then they scale up over 200. what do you get now though what did you close 2018 at in terms of run rate so we close at uh uh 2018 we closed march 31st we closed at uh uh 1.5 wait wait sorry what mark your f your fiscal year ends march ended march 31st 2018. okay and that was you said you you were doing about 1.5 million run right at that point so about 90 100 a month got it something like north of 100 a month okay um and then you've scaled now today to about what so we are at uh 2.4 and our visibility is to close it at 4.5 million error okay by by march 31st of this year 2019. okay so just to be clear i mean that's only you you're you say did i hear you right you're doing you said 2.4 million run rate today and you hope that in the next two months you're going to basically double that up to four and a half yeah because all the hard work of a few months are going to close in this uh this one so we under negotiation all this stuff is okay so you don't see consistent new bookings per month it's very heavily weighted between february and march each year yeah so that has been always a heavy year for us in terms of the error not as heavy though i mean this is like all your i mean this is like significant like doubling your company in two months is basically what you're telling me you're gonna do no so as i said we have a enterprise client and there are clients who are also in the line of paying a million dollar adding a million dollar error so there are multiple clients where we have been working for four five months past four five months are going to convert in this month so they're almost on the verge of closer okay so you're currently as a whole company right now doing 2.4 million bucks a year you're saying with almost complete confidence i'm watching your face you've got contracts where there's gonna be a million dollars that they are wiring to your bank account in the next two months more than so more than 50 percent of your whole business size today is going to come in from one new customer in the next two months no couple of...