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Around 85% of the farmers in India are smallholders, with limited reserves and adaptive capacities making them vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Access to credit is a key enabler to increase climate resilience of such farmers. However, only 30% are able to borrow from formal financial sources, due to limited insights into farm conditions and difficulties and high resource costs to gather and verify farm data.
Improved access to finance would increase farmers’ resilience to climate-related crop damage and lost income. However, financial institutions struggle to work with the 78 per cent of farmer households that are smallholders due to the difficulty and expense of assessing risk.2
SatSure uses satellite data analytics to unlock finance for smallholder farms. Proprietary AI-powered modelling gauges a farm’s income generation potential, allowing financial institutions to assess risk more accurately. The solution empowers financial institutions to issue credit and insurance policies faster, in higher volume, and more cost-effectively.
SatSure’s initial target markets agriculture and infrastructure business of banking and insurance companies and its clients include a number of local insurance and banking incumbents. ADB Ventures is working closely with Satsure to expand its operations outside of India, in markets such as Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh. Satsure is expected to help support ~2.5 million loans to smallholder farmers in the region by 2026 such that these farmers have the required access to capital and insurance to build their climate resilience.
The company has inked a memorandum of understanding with Samunnati by making farm-level monitoring of crop performance possible for Samunnati’s loanee farmers, while Samunnati provides financing for working capital and expansion needs3.
SatSure has also partnered with credit information company TransUnion CIBIL Limited to produce the CIBIL Credit & Farm Report, with SatSure providing geospatial data analytics for the report4. In addition to these partnerships, SatSure has also acquired Old City Innovations, a geospatial services company providing geospatial services in mortgage, agriculture, insurance, and drone markets5 and software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup CropTrails, with an eye to expanding to the US, Africa, SEA, and LATAM6.
Measures like rural credit scoring as well as weather-indexed crop insurance are highly effective tools used in the agriculture sector. Through this investment, ADB Ventures is looking to support smallholder farmers and strengthen these broader linkages between access to finance, insurance, and resilience to support climate change adaptation, and support climate change adaptation.
Satsure is a geospatial analytics company offering solution across agriculture, infrastructure, and climate change. It has partnered with leading financial institutions and insurance companies to make remote monitoring and assessment of agricultural farms easy, quick, and cost effective. By the end of 2021 it had supported 13000 farms loans of which 75 per cent were to smallholder farmers.
