Edge Executive Insight – Javier Soto, CEO, AgroCognitive – Innovator of the Year FINALIST
In the lead up to Edge Computing World, we’re taking some time to speak to key Executives from the leading companies. Today we’re talking with Javier Soto, CEO of AgroCognitive.
Tell us a bit about yourself – what led you to get involved in the edge computing market and AgroCognitive
I’m Computer science engineer, businessman and Data Analyst.
My personal history in agribusiness started in my childhood. My grand pa was a farmer and during many years (growing lemons and oranges) was my family business. But this prosperity was changing because the pests were destroying crops, Inputs price were rising nor mitigating affectations and production falling, my gran pa didn’t had enough money to invest in technology and it was the perfect formula for kicking out my family from this business. This story is happening to many farmers around the world
12 years after I founded a successful small IT consulting company (Smartbase Group), our country was going through the deepest political and economic crisis in its modern history (diaspora, food production falling and many industries closing). We moved forward fast and opened a branch in Ecuador and Chile to survive that crisis. As we stayed in Venezuela, we asked ourselves: what we could do to challenge that status quo? we had experience doing business analytics projects for sugar industry and we knew what were the production problems they had.
After many informal meetings we discovered sugar and other crops shared the same problems. So me and my team started AgroCognitive as an affordable platform to provide high tech services to farmers.
Leading this startup have been a new journey, build a new team, business model and networking at a higher level pushing me beyond my limit all time. This just convinces me that I’m on the right track!
What is it you & your company are uniquely bringing to the edge market?
There are many AgTech in ecosystem, our main advantage is customer do not need any capital investment to onboard into our platform.
We have been helping to transform agriculture current production model switching from man-labor based to a data-driven based. AgroCognitive allows to make data-driven decisions to boost productivity and efficiency. The data is collected directly through drones, satellites, farmers, weather services, and more. The gathered information is further processed and analyzed to find out what is going on the crop. The analyzed information is leveraged by farmers to adopt precision farming practices and boost productivity, help stakeholders to manage and mitigate risks, and corporates create their own food production apps.
How do you see the edge market developing over the next few years?
Growing faster. Making disrupting integration between IoT devices, robotics, AI, analytics to reach a singularity stage. In my space (agriculture), Agri-Robotics and AgTech will merge into one industry: Farming as a Service
