Trendlines Agrifood Fund invests in PlanetWatchers

The Trendlines Agrifood Fund has made a fourth investment, investing in PlanetWatchers, a crop monitoring company that can provide detailed information about any field or property, anytime, regardless of weather conditions in almost real-time.  PlanetWatchers’ first application is to dramatically increase the efficiency of the crop insurance claims process, reducing the typical processing time for a claim from many months to a virtually immediate response.

PlanetWatchers uses advanced machine learning to support crop insurers in reporting planting dates, acreage, crop classification and claims validation at scale. Using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, PlanetWatchers provides accurate insight regardless of cloud cover, bad weather or poor lighting. PlanetWatchers exploits the unique benefits of SAR, to create in-season insights that reduce overheads and increases customer satisfaction.

PlanetWatchers, for organizations such as crop insurance company ProAg, the World Bank and the Environmental Protection Agency, uses time series-based radar data to provide detailed analysis of claims without ever visiting the field. The use of SAR, a powerful remote sensing technology bouncing microwave signals off the Earth’s surface, helps PlanetWatchers to detect physical properties and the changes to them over time, providing valuable insights to its customers.

News of this partnership appeared in The Edge Private Equity Wire ,Insurance-Edge,  Times of Israel, Geektime.