Hydroponic farmer starts Kryzen, an artificial intelligence driven agriculture startup

Sudhir Devkar, a hydroponic farmer from Satara, Maharashtra, has come up with an innovative artificial intelligence driven solution to address the issues faced by farmers who follow the traditional farming methods. “I come from a traditional farming background. After continuously facing issues like water crisis, market price fluctuation, poor quality produce and high cost of fertilizers, pesticides, and labor unavailability, I started working on creating a hydroponic project with focus in mind how I can produce high quality, low price exotic quality food with minimum labor, water, and fertilizers with zero pesticides usage.”, says Sudhir Devkar. Sudhir Devkar, along with co-founder Vikrant Chowdhary, created Kryzen, a commercially viable hydroponics plant in order to address the pain points of the Indian farmer. Kryzen team has developed an in-house mobile application to control the farm and its Artificial intelligence-driven, reducing labor requirement by 1/6 th then traditional farming and giving accuracy up to 270% stronger than big automation equipment available. “With the help of artificial intelligence, we can track market pricing on day to day basis. Currently, we are tracking 50+ crops across Mumbai, Pune, and Bangalore markets. This gives us the flexibility to project market trends along with market requirements and pricing to decide crop cycle and expected financial returns.”, says Sudhir Devkar. Kryzen is the first commercially successful hydroponic plant in Maharastra. “Most of the other plants are either too small to sustain themselves and some of them are relied on hydroponic training or selling hydroponic equipment to generate profit. We have built our farm in 1/4th of cost of currently available technologies in the market”, says Vikrant Chowdhary. Kryzen has developed everything needed in-house with the help of daily wage workers. Currently, Kryzen is producing 50kg of sweet Italian basil every day in just 5000sqft area, and BigBasket is one of their biggest clients. “in conventional farming, 1-acre land is needed to take this much of production”, says Sudhir Devkar. Kryzen is planning to expand into cities where building terrace will be used for vegetable production and additionally helping us to reduce transportation costs providing fresh produce to consumers. “Our farming capacity is 3 times more than hi-tech hydroponic farm available in the market and 7 times more than traditional agriculture, space-wise”, says Sudhir Devkar. Kryzen is using 12000 liters of water per month to produce this much product which is 24 times less than traditional agriculture. In conventional agriculture, a farmer needs 3 lac liters of water every month for this production. Kryzen’s monthly operational cost is less than 10,000/- rupees, which include electricity, labor, maintenance, packaging, and fertilizers. Kryzen is selling at a price point between 50/- to 250/- per kg based on the season that gives me a pure profit of one lack rupees per month in lowest priced market, and in the higher market, it goes up to three lack seventy-five thousand. “We are producing constant quality vegetables at the same speed and all year round without getting impacted by climatic conditions.”, says Sudhir Devkar. Kryzen can work on a much lower price than market price due to fix operation costs and zero climate impact. “We developed all this technology and farming method on our own, and now we want to spread awareness into other farmers how they can create something like this and safeguard themselves from climatic conditions, market price fluctuation, water crisis, and labor issues.” Says Sudhir Devkar. With the help of innovative engineering, Kryzen has been able to bring down the cost of construction so low that they never went for any loan or subsidy from the government. The Kryzen team comprises of 17 employees working across various departments.