Agritech start-up Agdhi awarded BIRAC’s Biotechnology Ignition Grant

Bangalore

Agdhi, an agritech start-up, has announced in a press release that the company has been awarded the Biotechnology Ignition Grant (BIG), a flagship programme by the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC).

BIRAC is a not-for-profit Public Sector Enterprise and the largest early-stage biotech funding programme, says the release. Agdhi has received a grant from BIG for USD 70,000 for their flagship product, “SeedVision — Seed Classifier and Quality Analyser”.

SeedVision is an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based seed phenotyping method that classifies the critical parameters of a seed in a few minutes.  This product would help the farmers get good seeds for cultivation and help growers improve the number of cycles because of faster payment realization from seed companies. This automated technique provides an efficient method for seed sorting compared to manual inspection, and the reports are accessible on a real-time basis. 

The BIG team at C-CAMP said, "The entire team at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) has been a part of extensive discussions with the team Agdhi all through the five months of the Biotechnology Ignition Grant (BIG), currently managed through 8 BIG Partners across the country who work with the Ignition grantees (BIG Innovators) to provide mentoring, monitoring, networking and other business development related activities.”

The team also said, “The need and gap in the seed assessment market was clearly validated and executed till the idea to proof-of-principle stage by the technical team at Agdhi. We recognise the proposed solution at Agdhi is tailor-made and traction-oriented and look forward to many more discussions through and post the BIG grant."

Speaking on this occasion, Vaibhav Kashikar, Co-Founder & Director (Marketing), Agdhi, said, “We are delighted to announce the grant we have received that will support start-ups like us in bringing technology closer to market and help in the commercialization of the product across India.” He further added, “With a vision to disrupt technology in the agriculture sector, we plan to bring new technologies like block chain, edge computing, IoT, and microbiology in agriculture.”

Agdhi has won the National Bio Entrepreneurship Competition #NBEC2020 for best Agri Tech start up and has recently joined NVIDIA Inception, a programme designed to nurture start-ups revolutionizing industries with advancements in AI and data sciences.

Today, Agdhi is building new-age products and solutions catering to the seed and farmers community.