Organic greens indoors

A panoramic view

Here’s a green tech startup in India!

Ashish Khan and Deepak Srinivasan, two engineers, followed in the footsteps of their friends’ right after their B-Tech from NIT Trichy. But the entrepreneurial bug bit them soon and the duo initiated Crofters, a green tech startup in India, in 2016. Their six-year old friendship dated back to college days. And their shared passion for solving basic problems in society inspired them to start Crofters.

Crofters’ dwells in the space of indigenously designed/built smart, self-cleaning indoor aquaponics garden.’ The system is designed to grow healthy, organic food within indoors and at the same time offering a better lifestyle, also adding to aesthetics of consumer living spaces. The founders claim this company to be a first of its kind aquaponics system built in India, with majority of the systems being imported from China and other countries today.

In an exclusive chat with Baishali Mukherjee, the bootstrapped entrepreneurs reveal their brainchild…….

The beginning

While working on a side project related to home automation we wanted to apply the core strengths of IoT on a more fundamental problem. As we saw enormous scope of automation in agriculture, one of the oldest industries of mankind and being familiar to aquaponics we decided to do small prototypes to validate our idea of small automated farms. In the start of 2016 we started coming up with various small prototypes and then after months of designing and fabrication we came with our first MVP in June 2016. We started Crofters with the aim to localize food production by building intelligent, self-cleaning; aquaponics systems that help people grow completely organic food in the comfort of their homes.

The innovation

Our product is aimed to make people see and grow their own food, and that is achieved by this eco-friendly, indoor organic food growing system. The unique thing about this product is the technology that allows anyone to do it, within the comfort and confines of one’s home.” Aquaponics is a method of aquaculture, in which the waste produced by farmed fish or other aquatic creatures supply the nutrients for plants grown hydroponically, which in turn purify the water.

The fully indigenous ‘Crofters ecosystem’ is equipped with a self-cleaning 20-gallon aquarium and atop, a 330-square inch main grow-bed; the unit could easily and aesthetically fit into the living room of any house. An integrated storage compartment houses all the fish food, tools and other accessories.

Through innovation, we have built an intelligent Wi-Fi enabled app-and- sensor unit, which will help users monitor all the ecosystem parameters – light intensity, temperature, humidity and water levels. The LEDs inside the ecosystem are designed to mimic natural sunlight, to stimulate photosynthesis in plants. The LED’s could be controlled through the app, and be timed on a need basis, as per the growth of the plants in the bed. The LEDs are designed in an indoor appeasing white colour, and it also adds to the indoor visual appeal.  Customers could use the aquaponics system to grow vegetables, herbs or small fruits.

A truly ‘Make in India’ product

The Crofters ecosystem also showcases a truly ‘Make in India’ product. The orders are currently open in Chennai and Bangalore; Mumbai and Pune and will be catered to in the later part of 2017. We hope to reach 200 customers over the next six months in our current cities and make the product shippable throughout India by the end of the year. The next year Crofters will be looking at launching its product globally and will be coming up with B2B solutions for large scale vertical farms. Priced at Rs 29,000, the Crofters Ecosystem has already been installed with multiple early adopters. We have 15 early adopters for our flagship Crofters Ecosystem. We are going to start the sale of the market ready version of Crofters Ecosystem in the first week of June.

Crofters aquaponics system have been pro-bono installed in NGO ‘Teach For India’ led schools – the students in these schools will have the opportunity to witness for themselves how science and agriculture are intertwined with each other. The students have a well-designed courseware through the Crofters for Education initiative – which will help them learn the concepts of science in a more practical way.

The building exercise

Our initial investment was close to Rs 2,00,000 for the prototypes and we put in our savings from their previous employment. While we were designing the first MVP of Crofters Ecosystem, one of our friends, Siva was excited about the idea and he immediately wanted to get our Ecosystem for his dad. That is how we were sold our first MVP. And we were able to get more early adopters through word of mouth.

We have raised seed money of Rs 25 lakh from Centre of Entrepreneurship and Development (CEDI) NIT Trichy. CEDI believes in our vision of localizing food production and empowering people to grow their own food. When we approached the CEDI team they saw the innovation in our product and a team which could make this product a reality and thereby went ahead with funding us.

The experience

It is very important to find the right set of customers for initial testing of the MVP. At Crofters, we have been lucky to have a few great early adopters who have been patient and kind enough to give feedback which has helped us in shaping a better product.

The journey has been tremendous. We learnt a lot on how to convert the buzz and excitement people get on the product into sales through a hard way. We have people coming into our office regularly to experience the ecosystem. At times, we get a lot of questions and feedback though people asking for a lot of features at the end of day. They tend to use only the basic features which we found out through the user behavior data, so it is important to focus more on the basic functionality and improve the user experience around it. This is the most important thing we as a company have learnt.

Fear kills more dreams than failure ever- this is the idea that keeps us going.

What has been your experience with growing organic greens indoors or in your gardens? Please share your story.