A few years ago, the Plantix app would have been the stuff of science fiction. All you have to do is take an image of a plant that’s sick and the app identifies the disease and recommends the treatment to cure the plant. But now it's a reality. The app has helped more than one million small-scale farmers improve productivity. On the latest episode of the podcast, we sit down with Simone Strey the Founder and  CEO of Plantix, and talk about her journey from a researcher to an entrepreneur; how she built Plantix: what metrics she tracks to scale the app; how she’s looking to monetize the platform; the company's strategy to hire;  and how she approached investors to fund a pre-revenue organization.   

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About the Guest

Simone Strey is the Founder and CEO of Plantix. During her Ph.D. in Brazil, she and her husband Robert Strey worked with farmers in the Amazon. Here the idea was born to train machine learning algorithms to become digital plant experts. Plantix is an app that allows users to take an image of crop diseases on their smartphone and then diagnose the ailments and prescribes the remedy for the plant. More than 30% of the worldwide harvest is lost due to plant diseases and pests - Plantix is there to change this. Simone studied Geography and Botany in Hannover, Germany.   

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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian