Fasal - Grow More, Grow Better™

How Can Deeptech Empower Climate-Resilient Agriculture? In a world where climate change is impacting crop productivity and farming practices, the need for sustainable and resilient agricultural solutions has never been more urgent. Farmers need tools to adapt and thrive in unpredictable conditions. Startups in climate-resilient agriculture tech are providing innovative solutions for a sustainable farming future. Fasal - Grow More, Grow Better™ integrates sensors, weather data, and crop models for precise irrigation and crop advice. oorja Development Solutions builds solar-powered infrastructure for farmers, including irrigation and cold storage. Ecozen combines energy storage and IoT for smart irrigation and post-harvest management. Stellapps Technologies Private Limited enhances the dairy supply chain with IoT and analytics, improving efficiency and quality. These Deeptech startups are blending technology with sustainability, creating resilient systems that benefit both farmers and the planet. How will your innovation support climate-resilient agriculture? Nasscom Deeptech | Sangeeta Gupta | Kavita Doshi | Shreya Sharma | Shalini Dewan | Shivam Sareen | Amit Saraogi | Ananda Verma | Devendra Gupta | Ranjith Mukundan #NasscomDeeptech #IndiaMeansInnovation #SustainableAgriculture

It was a delight to be at AI and AgriTech Innovation Center (AIAIC) conference in Mumbai. As the conversations settles, I keep coming back to one thing Chief Minister Sh. Devendra Fadnavis said: that Maharashtra will become the use case capital of AI in agri! A use case is not a demo. It means something works on real farms, across seasons, under variability, and keeps working as it scales. And when that happens, it does not just change how a crop is grown, but changes how the entire chain around it behaves. Agriculture is a connected system. What happens in the field determines quality, which then determines price. Predictability determines whether something can be financed, insured, processed & moved efficiently. For a long time, most of this system has run on partial visibility. But when intelligence is built on top of live data & tied to execution, the nature of the system itself changes. Production becomes predictable. Procurement is confident. Logistics can be planned than reacted to. Processing runs closer to capacity. Traceability becomes a by-product of daily operations rather than a separate exercise. That is when agriculture becomes dependable. The panel I was part of was on convergence. The way I explained it was through our journey at Fasal. We built farm-level IoT infrastructure because the base data layer did not exist. Without ground truth, models will only be generic. Once sensing, intelligence & execution became one loop, decisions begin landing inside precise windows & outcomes start feeding back as learning. Convergence is the point at which the system truly becomes one. Reality is captured continuously, interpreted in its true context, triggering action and improving everything next cycle. That loop is what creates reliability. And reliability has 2nd & 3rd order effects. When outcomes are reliable the chain falls into its right place. Insurance can price actual risk. Supply chains can depend on consistency. Public programs can measure impact instead of activity. This is why a statewide agricultural data exchange matters. A shared, live, high-quality data backbone means institutions & innovators stop rebuilding ground truth from scratch. The speed of learning & building across the ecosystem goes up. What was encouraging at #AI4Agri was the alignment with execution. Government setting direction. Startups deploying working systems. Industry connecting them to markets. That alignment does not happen without leadership willing to take risks. The Government of Maharashtra (GoM), made a choice to pioneer this. What Minister Sh. Dr Jitendra Singh said was important: that this will become a beacon for other states. When a state of this size proves the model, it does not stay contained. It sets the template. I have spent yrs making the case. In that room, the case was made. What remains is execution! Vikas Rastogi | SHRIKANT ANDGE | Abhay Pareek | Dr. Mohamed Adil A.A | Vikas Kanungo | Fasal - Grow More, Grow Better™

The Great new rebuild of the world! Last week I joined a panel in Singapore hosted by Antares Ventures, alongside Nicholas Parker, Daniel Tay (Temasek) & Deepak Waghmare (Dell), to discuss where AI is already delivering measurable outcomes in live environments. I spoke about how Fasal - Grow More, Grow Better™ uses IoT networks & models to turn real-time data into irrigation, fertiliser & crop protection decisions that growers execute. This has saved atleast 100B litres of water, reduced pumping energy and chemical intensity, & made food production more stable in water & power constrained regions. During the discussion, we got into a comparison I hadn't thought about before: data centres are not just a power story, they are a water and cooling story. The water we've saved equals the annual cooling requirement of 100+ data centres. But the highlight of the conference for me was Michael Gryseels walking through the Antares thesis. I've been convinced for a while that the next great solutions will be deep tech. This thesis made it vivid. For the last 100 yrs, growth came from burning more carbon. For the last 50 yrs, it came from shrinking transistors on the chip to make compute faster. Both models have hit physical limits. Carbon is unpredictable, unreliable, and damaging. Silicon can't scale through smaller transistors anymore because they generate too much heat, consume too much power, and waste energy moving data. So we build massive data centres instead. One problem became another. Compute is now heavy infrastructure. It needs dense power, thermal management at scale, advanced materials, land, grid stability and real-time control. Digital and physical have truly converged! $5T+ is being committed to clean energy & new manufacturing by 2030. But that capital is going in before we've solved the fundamental constraints. This requires a great new rebuild of the world. The entire physical economy, Energy generation, Semiconductor fabrication, Urban infrastructure. Control systems, Materials science! All need to be rebuilt. And when you envision that world, you realize this great rebuild will only happen by unlocking science. 4 bottlenecks need solving: power density, heat management, advanced materials, and control systems that orchestrate complexity in real-time. Not another app but Core science and engineering. For years we described Fasal as PrecisionAg platform. This framework made me realize we're actually operating a control system for biological infrastructure at massive scale. The outcome is not better operated farms but freeing up water & energy that entire regions can use. If you're building data centres, chip fabs or energy infrastructure in regions where agriculture operates - we must talk! As compute & physical infrastructure converge, agricultural water efficiency becomes part of the same system equation. We can create net positive water impact even as compute demand rises. Milena Nikolova | Louis Christian Volk Murayama