The End of Agritech Software

When I read “The End of Software”, I received a powerful satori glimpse of how creative forces of destruction might birth the next generation of agritech software. Written by a VC, the thesis contains its share of hyperbole (“Majoring in computer science today will be like majoring in journalism in the late 90’s.”). Nevertheless, it helps illuminate a few vectors about the future of agritech software we are headed towards.

“Vogue wasn’t replaced by another fashion media company, it was replaced by 10,000 influencers. Salesforce will not be replaced by another monolithic CRM. It will be replaced by a constellation of things that dynamically serve the same intent and pain points. Software companies will be replaced the same way media companies were, giving rise to a new set of platforms that control distribution.” - Chris Paik

The operating word is “control distribution”

Would a CIO of a large agribusiness firm pay for “a constellation of things that dynamically serve the same intent and pain points”? I am not sure. Would the CIO move beyond the ‘SaaS model of amortizing development cost’’ and pay for outcomes measured by the platform?

You bet:)

The point isn’t between choosing microservices over the incumbent monolithic model.

Climate Field View will continue to command a premium for its integration and vendor management capabilities. In fact, declouding is catching enough steam now to suggest that companies might be better off with on-prem infrastructure rather than Cloud.

Let’s now imagine a scenario from the future. I am the CIO of a third-generation global biological company in 2025.

Given the nature of agri-input biologicals, I want to compare the performance of my products in tropical and temperate regions and see if I can offer any specific grower-specific insights for my sales and marketing teams.

I am aware that tropical soils tend to have lower organic matter (compared to temperate soils) and given the vast difference in nutrient cycling, if I want to discern how my biologicals are performing in different regions, I could churn out actionable insights by orchestrating various platforms together - agronomy platforms, soil management platforms, farm management platforms et al.

The platform that lets me do this orchestration securely with drag-and-drop capabilities will have non-linear gains over the rest.

Today, if I buy a biological product, I am buying the product’s promise to enhance plant’s uptake of both macro and micro-nutrients.

Tomorrow, if I buy a biological product, I will buy the product’s promise to enhance the plant’s uptake of both macro and micro-nutrients along with the digital platform that will validate the promise.

Tomorrow’s agritech platform will have a product DNA along with dual services + insurance platform capabilities that could act as a powerful GTM engine propelling its growth.

Few weeks ago, my good friend and long-time esteemed ABM member Shubhang Shankar wrote a powerful take on the agritech zeitgeist.

“The only segments that seem to be delivering on that vision seem to be Precision / Smart spraying technologies, Fintech and Robotics. The pivot of many data analytics / vision based scouting startups into Precision Spraying or Carbon credit MRV can thus be taken to be validation of this view” - Shubhang Shankar.

There is an integrated product + SaaS game waiting to be played at scale across each of these categories. With cutting-edge technologies like CRISPR and Artificial Intelligence, we could see the next Cambrian Explosion of agritech platforms that would play these technology arbitrage games.

When I analyzed Cropin 's $14 Mn fundraise from 谷歌 , I wrote,

“In a complex-to-digitalise domain like agritech where Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety makes it difficult to aggregate and commoditized data at scale, as you scale up with an increase in acres/hectares analyzed, you should ideally move towards Law of Increasing Returns. What happens, in reality, is that you often tend to move towards Law of Diminishing Returns.”

Playing technology arbitrage games is the only way to move towards the Law of Increasing Returns

When Farmers Edge talks about managed services and Pairwise talks about “What’s Your CRISPR Strategy”, if you dig beneath the surface, they are talking about playing technology arbitrage games for their clients.

Would Leaf Agriculture go beyond evaluating agronomy LLMs and provide ecosystem orchestration for customers to play with different LLMs and pay based on outcomes?

Would KissanAI’s Agricopilot platform run on outcome-based pricing structures?

I don’t know:)

“SaaS, ARR, magic numbers–these are all shorthand to understand the old model of business building in software, one where the expense associated with creating software was a moat. The invisible hand has been stayed in software for a long time, but LLMs will usher in its swift, familiar corrective force" - Chris Paik

LLMs will usher ‘its swift, familiar corrective force’ and birth the next generation of androgynous agritech platforms that go beyond binary product and service identities. And that will be exciting!!