SatSure

SatSure's vision is to be a leader in technology and business model innovation for enabling successful implementation of sustainability initiatives, especially financial inclusion of farmers in developing countries. By creating solutions that lie at the convergence of satellite image analytics, cloud computing, Big Data, and artificial intelligence, SatSure aims to build decision intelligence that guides stakeholders towards actionable interventions.
This requires tremendous amount of synchronisation of technology and business plans to generate data, whose asymmetry is the root cause of the poor rate of successful sustainability projects in developing markets. Utilizing the large area monitoring capabilities of satellites, SatSure has constantly innovated in simplifying delivery by creating bespoke products and commoditizing data. By 2030 it is expected that 85% of the world's population will be in developing countries, thus it is critical that we build solutions to solve the developing world's problems.

SatSure is a technology platform company, with its solutions designed at the intersection of the sustainability nexus of food, water, and energy security for the other 3 billion. Only in India, a country with a population of 1.4 billion and 55% of its workforce employed in the agriculture sector, over 150 million+ rural farmers do not have access to institutional credit and only about 20% farmers are covered by crop insurance. As the effects of climate change become more prominent with frequent droughts and natural catastrophes, investment in agriculture technology has to be complemented with investments in the financial services and policy making approach that support agriculture as improved credit flows and well designed crop insurance plays an important role in increasing the farmer's potential to earn and invest in sustainable agriculture practices. SatSure's decision intelligence solutions that span across agriculture, energy, and infrastructure sectors aims to address the above problems, especially in developing countries which have dubious data quality, by designing solutions that helps in planning, monitoring, and implementation of projects towards financial inclusion, sustainable development, and climate action.

Farmers in developing countries are one of the fastest adopters of mobile phones enabling access to digital services that were earlier impossible. SatSure's vision to enable the financial inclusion of farmers from remotest regions of developing countries is by enabling organizations such as banks, insurers, and policy makers with capacity, intelligence and outreach to service these farmer. All these beneficiary organisations primarily have been using indirect datasets like personal data, collateral data, demographic data to define financial policies and credit-worthiness pertaining to agriculture sector. Also, banks and governments have traditionally relied on a large number of field staff to obtain basic agricultural information and monitor agricultural assets, leading to a lack of data standardization, authenticity, accuracy and frequent delays. And such loan management practices were majorly due to lack of any alternate solution that can work at large spatial scales. Hence, SatSure's solutions are empowering all the people associated in this credit cycle - starting from the credit policy makers, bank's lead generation staff, field staff who onboard farmers and perform collections operations, credit underwriters, and eventually the farmers who have better chances to get loans for their crops at the right time.

Enabling farmer financial inclusion demands working with multiple large and small organisations, both public and private, engaged in agricultural credit lending and policymaking.

SatSure works in a B2B and B2G model, building the product through a customer engagement approach.

The basic tenet of SatSure's crop intelligence product suite is the idea of creating digital twins of farmlands by mimicking crop growth parameters through proxy indices generated using satellite remote sensing, both in near real-time and historical patterns.

However, information such as climatic data, local market arrival rates, crop pricing, land ownership, customer payment behavior, and irrigation is needed by lenders for a 360-degree view on credit decisions, lead generation, and collections planning. This data is addressed through agreements - both commercial and partnerships with AgTech and FinTech firms.

Correlation between these data points, modeling the cropping cycle, while converting scientific information into simple financial data that is easy to understand and consume for the end-users at banks, governments, insurance, and microfinance agencies are addressed though SatSure's product.

A phased implementation with banks by integrating with their loan lifecycle management process is the first step towards unlocking the economies of scale through addition of more number of farmers who have been previously unaddressed or addressed but with a poorly designed loan and insurance products due to unavailability of quality data for underwriting.

SatSure's solutions are easy to implement across geographies since, primary input comes from satellite image analytics, and a large part of growth would be to replicate the success of India to SEA and Africa.

The competitive advantages that SatSure has over its competitors are as laid below:
Proprietary Technology built through deep expertise of the team and exclusive working relationships with users, data partners, and a Business Model that has carefully woven barriers to entry for competition and created multiple re-use and recycling of its input data and products, and geographies in which it is operating, where land holdings are small and there exists high diversity in crop management practices and agro-climatic zones, with very poor data infrastructure.
There are a few other organizations like CropIn, Farmguide, Harvesting, and Skymet which are addressing the same future of work challenges, but come with very distinct approaches. For example, CropIn has been in FarmERP business since 2011 while SatSure started operations in 2017 with a focus on satellite image analytics, making the data extraction of farms highly scalable and independent of manual site visits.

SatSure leverages the following technologies -
Big Data systems and cloud computing to manage heavy workloads and deliver consistent service levels to the clients
Satellite image processing for extracting trends on crop parameters like health, moisture, sowing and harvest progress, and crop area through image classification process
Computer Vision - to scale the image processing without loss in accuracy of the outputs
Artificial Intelligence is used extensively to study patterns that can be pulled through the satellite image trends, and find relationships with other datasets

Thus, SatSure is bringing ground agricultural and weather data and converting it to decision intelligence delivered through an online digital dashboard and mobile app to it's clients. With increased digital penetration, the reach of banking services increases which leads to increased inbound credit queries. To cater to these requirements of first time borrowers with no official credit history, requires digitalisation of agricultural and geospatial data, which is what SatSure does through its large area analytics solutions.

As mentioned, SatSure works indirectly to help farmers enter the financial ecosystem.
A banking client used SatSure's product across 20% of it's portfolio one cropping season in India. Within a season, the bank was able to provide 84,000 farm loans across 5 states. It enabled the bank with sales and recoveries of approximately INR 3000 Crore (USD 400 Million)
As per MasterCard Foundation's independent report, one of SatSure's banking clients was able to increase it's book size by 2% and reduce the NPAs by 1.5% in agriculture, within a year.

The metrics used to measure the success at SatSure are:
Number of new loans enabled
Size of the portfolio monitored for banks
No of interventions created for the farmers
Happiness of customers

SatSure's top three goals for next year are:
Build products handling end- to -end business cycle with geospatial intelligence across agriculture, infrastructure and energy verticals
Expand its footprint and operations globally and rapidly
Work on the interaction design of the products to inculcate the cultural differences that dictate their usability.

Internal Risks: Based on 7S model, SatSure recognizes 3 areas with internal risks.
Strategy: So far Government organisations were major revenue drivers for SatSure. SatSure has had more than 1000% growth rate which though good, also adds risks to the business.
Staff: SatSure being a small start up and asset light, the increased business growth has equivalent pressure on the team to deliver, which can affect the deliveries to clients. Increasing staff strategically based on business pipleline will help manage the risk.
Skills: To operate in the industry, SatSure needs human resources with a combination of diverse and niche skill sets like agriculture, remote sensing, financial industry etc. which is not easy to find. Skill development and capacity building is essential to manage the risk.
External Risks: Based on PESTEL model, SatSure has recognized the following as risks:
Political: All the three major industry touchpoints of SatSure's business - agriculture, space, and financial services, are heavily influenced by political events
Legal: Space industry is strictly governed by laws set by individual countries. Any major change in the laws governing usage of satellite data can affect the industry. Also, data privacy and cloud security have emerged as issues that we need to take care of on a case by case basis, depending on the geography of operation. 

 SatSure's business strategy is to increase the revenue share from private companies to mitigate the risk posed by current reliance on revenue from governments.
Diversification across geography helps mitigate the external risks both in terms of legal and political scenario.

25 employees

SatSure has offices in Bangalore, Switzerland, London, and Trivandrum, with the corporate headquarters being in Switzerland while the technology development and delivery happens from India (Bangalore and Trivandrum).

The business logic of having a Swiss parent entity being the following--
Access to resources (financing, commercial satellite data acquisition ease)
Closeness to core customers in financial services and multi-lateral agencies
Ease of doing business in Africa and SE-Asia
However, the DNA of the company is very Indian and the majority of the team is based out of Bangalore, where high quality human resources with good local industry knowledge can be acquired steadily with ease at favorable price points.

SatSure is successfully positioned to achieve it's target of large scale impact on financial industry in developing countries due to the strategic and business advantages of its corporate structure.

Bootstrapped for 3 years while scaling to a team of 25 people across three geographies, SatSure broke even before the first investor (VilCap Investments). This highlights sustainability, resiliency in the business model, capability for a long term financial stability and global expansion.

Operating on a B2B and B2G model, our clients have a large lifetime value with Individual ticket sizes higher than B2C companies as we operate on annual subscriptions, structured around number of modules, coverage area, and data refresh frequency. Service integration and client capacity building is charged separately.

SatSure has two sources of business generation:
Direct Customers: Companies whom SatSure directly sells to are categorized as direct customers.

Go-To-Market Partners: SatSure has partnerships with companies like Globalsat, PwC, Accenture, and Antrix enabling joint business development and service delivery arrangements. This helps SatSure enhance its business prospects, investing lower amount of resources, and getting market entry across sectors.

If selected as a Solver, we would use the resources and prize funding as follows:

1. Product Department
Eight hirings for Data Science and DevOps (Experience: 3-5 years)
Procurement of software licenses and certifications/accreditation

2. Sales and BD towards marketing & sales
Global key account management head (Experience: 10 years)
Junior pre-sales person (Experience: 2 years)
Two mid-career sales executives

3. Marketing and Operations
Operations (cloud and data costs being the major drivers)
Digital marketing, print media etc.
Meet Ups to build a strong data ecosystem

The recognition will be streamlined for:
Building partnerships
Reaching to commercial customers
Enhance product maturity and spread across geographies