This App Set Out to Fight Pesticides. After VCs Stepped In, Now It Helps Sell Them

This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit journalism organization.

It’s 2016 and Simone Strey looks giddy. In the video, a clip from a series titled Innovators Under 35: Germany, the agritech entrepreneur awkwardly explains the challenge of jumping into the business side of the startup world. “We are all more from science,” she says in her German-accented English. But she and her team of coders, anthropologists, botanists, and plant pathologists had struck on something unique. Something potentially very big.

Their app, called Plantix, could near-instantaneously diagnose a crop pest or disease simply by looking at a photo of the plant. This was potentially world-altering technology. For smallholding farmers in developing nations, who grow more than a third of the world’s food, having Plantix on your phone was like having a highly accurate plant pathologist in your back pocket, one who would also present afflicted farmers with options for treatment. If successful, Strey says a little sheepishly in the clip, Plantix would “save the environment by using less pesticides.”

Flash forward to 2019, and Strey has mounted a London stage before a sparse audience of private investors looking for the next big thing in agritech. Gone are the nervous laughs and apprehension. Standing in a knee-length green sweater in front of a blue-lighted wall, she confidently gestures to a projected image of her app in the weathered hand of a farmer somewhere in India and describes a future in which farmers grow more food, make more money, and send their kids to better schools.

In the years between pitches, Plantix had begun a journey toward becoming one of the world’s most successful digital tools for agriculture, serving more than 30 million farmers who upload some 50,000 images to the platform a day.

But by the time Strey faced those investors in London, she was describing a very different vision for Plantix. No longer did she speak about saving the environment or using fewer chemicals: Now, she said, “We want to start a revolution in the agri-supply chain.”

This subtle shift spoke volumes about what was happening behind the scenes. During the three intervening years, Strey and her team had reshaped Plantix from a tool they hoped would help reduce global pesticide use into an app that would make it easier for farmers to buy pesticides. What Strey left out of her pitch was that developing such powerful AI is expensive, and Plantix was in stiff competition with other agritech startups for limited funding from venture capital investors who wanted surefire profit. A brilliant idea beautifully executed wasn’t enough to win them over—Plantix would have to recast itself into something purpose-built for fast capital.

And their strategy worked. Less than a month after the pitch in London, Plantix announced that it had received $7.3 million from a group of venture capital investors. In less than a year, it would raise another $5.5 million, this time with money from one of the largest retailers of pesticides in the world. Today, that company, Helm AG, owns Plantix, and the app is thriving: its 134,000 daily active users on average diagnose a pest every 1.5 seconds.

Success for Plantix would come at the cost of an ideal that gradually morphed from disrupting and lessening the harms of an entrenched industry to enabling it—and potentially contributing to a practice that is poisoning farmers and ecosystems the world over. It’s an all-too-familiar story for mission-driven agritech startups, one that illuminates the bargains even the most idealistic of entrepreneurs must strike to survive in a savage industry.

Before 2013, many Silicon Valley investors were wary of agritech, the name given to the application of advanced technologies and computing to agriculture. Farming is more complex and fragmented than other sectors of the economy, in part due to the uncertainties of weather, environmental pressures, global markets, and local policies. Agriculture’s cycles are seasonal rather than quarterly, and its best ideas may need many years to bear fruit.

With the right amount of money, however, some investors and digital entrepreneurs saw these challenges as opportunities for optimization, whether through robotics, cloud computing, data analytics, or apps that could help farmers reduce their inputs. The trouble was that no one had yet shown that Silicon Valley–style tech investment in agriculture could provide a clear and fast path to profitability, the way disruptors of retail, telecommunications, and health care had.

Then, in 2013, Monsanto (since subsumed into Bayer) paid nearly $1 billion for Climate Corporation, a startup specializing in weather prediction powered by machine learning. The purchase launched a rush that pushed funding for agtech startups from $3.1 billion in 2012 to $51.7 billion in 2021, according to the online venture-capital investment platform AgFunder.

Around that time, Strey and her husband and cofounder, Robert, were teaching farmers in Gambia how to make organic fertilizer through a nonprofit they had started called Green Desert. The Streys had studied geography and soil science at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany. At home, they ran in local punk circles, and a trace of anti-establishment nonconformity has colored their work in agriculture. Simone wears thin blonde dreads; Robert has long sported a mohawk.

During academic fieldwork in Brazil, the Streys came to believe that most farmers’ needs were simple: They wanted to know what was wrong with their plants and how to fix them. Back in Germany, Robert began toying with an AI-powered image-recognition algorithm, and the Streys and five others founded Progressive Environmental & Agricultural Technologies (PEAT) as an academic spinoff of their university. In 2015, with support from the German government, PEAT launched the Plantix app.

The app hid an insanely powerful tool behind a simple face. To use it, a farmer simply photographs an ailing plant with a smartphone, then uploads the image to the app. This was a remarkable achievement at the time. In 2017, AI famously struggled to distinguish a helicopter from a rifle. Plantix’s algorithm consults a database of crops, pests, and diseases sorted by geographic region and provides a diagnosis within seconds. As farmers the world over fed the algorithm photos, Plantix learned to identify more than 780 types of damage to 82 types of crops. According to PEAT, it functions with around 95 percent accuracy.

Initially imagining its product as a tool for smallholders in low-income countries, PEAT offered it for free. And early on, the team tried to promote preventative measures in addition to remedies—measures such as cropping techniques, garlic tea, and wasps that eat common pests as alternatives to chemical pesticides, says Charlotte Schumann, a social anthropologist and Plantix cofounder who left the company in 2018 to pursue research. “Then we realized that people wouldn’t use our app unless they had a problem.”

Even if Plantix was to be a purely altruistic endeavor, it needed funding to sustain and improve. From the beginning, though, the team hoped to build a sustainable business. The realization that prevention was less lucrative than treatment was one of many that would gradually lead Plantix away from its foundational notions of environmental benevolence. Then, in 2016, the team won a scholarship that sent Robert on a field trip to Silicon Valley. What he learned there would break Plantix out of its do-good academic bubble and into the cutthroat world of for-profit enterprise.

In Silicon Valley, Strey met venture capitalists who liked what they saw in Plantix and who didn’t seem particularly concerned that its founders had not yet turned a profit. With an idea so good, surely the money would come, went the thinking. But the Streys knew the company would have to find the money soon.

Part of the challenge was that few in agritech at the time had given much thought to how to extract revenue from smallholders with digital tools like apps, Simone Strey says. “There was no blueprint for our business model,” which sought to change the world by improving the lives of hundreds of millions of growers who work just a few acres.

“When you see founders who really want to change the world, they’re so rare,” says Galina Chifina of RTP Global, one of Plantix’s early venture capital investors. “They did want to improve the lives of the farmer; this was sincere passion.” What the funders saw was that the app also promised to generate mountains of user data detailing farm operations—and that was valuable.

In its first funding round, Plantix pulled in $1 million, and the team moved its operations to the Berlin offices of one of its investors. Freshly funded, they were now selling the idea that they would be profitable someday, somehow. At that time, investors were hungry for a unicorn to repeat Climate Corp’s success. Interest rates were low, and firms were willing to take financial risks as long as they saw growth.

“Growth, growth, fast growth,” Strey says of what investors were after. “You burn money to grow.” Before its introduction to venture capital, the Plantix team had imagined success as simply making a profitable business. But a modest goal “hasn’t always been that sexy for investors,” who prefer to rapidly build toward a single giant payout, Strey says.

The team quickly realized that if Plantix was going to survive as a brilliant idea with no clear business model, they would have to give venture capitalists what they wanted: More downloads, more users who could somehow, someday be monetized.

At that point, Plantix was considering operating in Mali, population 23 million. After learning at an innovation conference that India was home to approximately 150 million smallholders, Strey jumped to shift the company’s focus to the subcontinent. The team quickly established a partnership with a local research group and set up a field office in Hyderabad and began teaching the algorithm to recognize local pests and crops in Indian languages. By the end of January 2018, Plantix had grown to about 300,000 monthly users and raised $4.9 million in one more round of VC funding.

Moving to India, where food and agriculture is an $800 billion industry, has become an obvious choice for aspiring agritech startups. In recent years, its government has aggressively expanded telecommunications infrastructure, increasing the number of smartphone users to about 450 million people and doubling coverage in rural areas. That meant a farmer walking through an ailing field in Jharkhand could be scrolling Plantix in search of remedies.

To use the app, farmers provide their crop selection, acreage, and input applications, then upload photos with embedded GPS coordinates. Some growers use the app weekly or even daily, contributing to a deep and detailed real-time image of farming across India. Their use has helped Plantix’s AI grow more accurate while collecting information that could prove invaluable to crop buyers, seed sellers, tool manufacturers, loan lenders, insurance providers, and pesticide sellers.

During pitches, Strey told me, she saw how investors lit up at just the mention of data. “[The idea] sold good toward the investors, even though we never proved that we could make money out of it.”

The problem, as many companies have discovered, is that every buyer of data wants some particular slice of the information presented in a specific way. Plantix would need to be reorganized around producing and packaging marketable data products, and the economics never penciled out.

By 2018, Plantix was working exclusively in India and burning through its last round of funding to pay its growing team and further expand. It was also starting to realize that farmers downloading the app wanted quick and certain solutions to their problems.

The app had always provided farmers with both biological and chemical suggestions, but up until this point “we didn’t recommend any specific product from any specific company,” says Alfonso Mateo Penas, a former Plantix plant physiologist. Instead, the app told a farmer what active ingredient might help with the identified pest and left them to talk with a retailer or local ag extension agent to figure out how much and in what form they needed it.

At the time, Penas was the only plant pathologist on staff. He was not yet fully certified to prescribe specific chemical products to farmers, and he didn’t think Plantix should offer that service. India already had a problem with pesticides, which farmers struggling with increased pest pressure and insecticide resistance apply in ever-increasing quantities, often without adequate safety gear.

Studies show that pesticide use in India has jumped 30 percent over the past two decades, with tragic effects. Adults exposed to small amounts of the common insecticide chlorpyrifos, for example, may experience nausea, blurred vision, and headaches. A child exposed to it over time can develop permanent brain damage and memory loss. Each year in India, an estimated 70,000 people die from pesticide poisoning. An increasing number of them are desperate farmers who ingest the chemicals to die by suicide.

Around 2018, with Plantix in need of more funding, the team began meeting with agricultural supply retailers across India to sketch out Plantix Partner, an online marketplace where a company could sell products such as pesticides and herbicides directly to farmers via the popular mobile app. Under this new iteration, Plantix would identify the pest, suggest a brand-name pesticide, and link the farmer with a local seller.

Investors liked the new model, but before committing, Penas proposed installing protocols to make sure the app was providing farmers with an accurate diagnosis. He wanted to ask them about the weather, their planting schedule, and harvest date. He also recommended that farmers submit additional photos of diseased plants elsewhere in their fields. He warned that symptoms of some diseases look alike, some pests might show up in areas where they’re not expected, and some fungal attacks look like bacterial infections.

“For me, it was important to make sure that we are really dealing with the disease in question and not another one,” he says. “Really, that’s the minimum you could do.”

But the founders had spent nearly five years toiling on an app that had yet to prove profitable and were feeling the heat.

“At a certain point, you start being pressured by the market,” Chifinia says. “So when you try to raise your next big round, people want to see a business, not just a vision. And that’s a very important moment in the life of every startup, because this is a moment when the founders have to choose.”

Ultimately, the founders reasoned that implementing Penas’ suggestions would take too long, and they didn’t want to risk losing the attention of impatient farmers. His recommendation was rejected, and in 2019 he left the company.

“At the end of the day, what corrupted the application was the role of the investors,” he says. “And unfortunately, I don’t think the founders had any choice if they wanted to make money out of it.”

Schumann, the former Plantix anthropologist, says she never witnessed an investor make specific demands. However, “with every investment round, you have to grow your goals and have to grow big,” she says. “Every venture capitalist firm has a portfolio and is scouting for tech trends and wants to find the one solution that will bring them this big profit. In that way, there’s a big indirect influence.”

By 2020, Plantix acquired and folded into their app a Swiss-based sales automation tool called Salesbee, fully bringing Plantix Partner to life. With this platform, Plantix began purchasing inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers in bulk directly from producers—including Dow, BASF, Syngenta, and Bayer—and then selling those products to the retailers that farmers would visit for their remedies. With the app now touting the retailer-facing sales platform and the farmer-facing Your Crop Doctor—a handheld plant physician that could diagnose, prescribe, and broker the sale of “medicine,” the app’s euphemism for inputs—the Plantix team raised a further $7.3 million during a fourth round of venture capital funding late in 2019.

This final evolution in its business model led the company even further from its organic, home-grown beginnings with Green Desert. With full vertical integration, Plantix had now streamlined a farmer’s path to agricultural inputs, making them easier to both find and purchase than ever before. The feat easily drew the attention of a multinational agrochemical corporation: Hamburg-based Helm AG, which specializes in pharmaceuticals, chemical feedstocks, and fertilizers.

From the beginning, Plantix’s seven founders each had their own vision of what the company could be. Strey says hers has been more or less unwavering: to help farmers grow more food more sustainably. “The philosophy which we have at Plantix is not white or black towards biological treatments and chemical products,” she says. Instead, it relies on an approach, developed in the 1970s, called integrated pest management, which combines biological and chemical controls. The latter are to be used only when absolutely needed.

For smallholders whose livelihoods may depend on a single season’s yield, Strey says that if it would save a crop she “would be more than happy giving them the heavy chemical.” And she is confident that the app is improving the lives of farmers, pointing to a 2021 company survey of farmer insights. This sole quantification of Plantix’s impact was sponsored by one of its investors, Happiness Capital, a Lee Kum Kee Group venture that funds startups seeking to “co-create a happier world with us.”

Through 416 phone interviews, the survey determined that Plantix is having a generally positive impact on those who use it, even if just 20 percent of the polled farmers said they observed higher crop production and only 17 percent spoke about increased income.

One anonymous 25-year-old male farmer reported: “I have learnt to use the right amount of pesticides and slurry rather than dumping it in my fields in anticipation that my crops will be saved.”

Though taken from a small sample collected by a vested interest, Strey has been able to use this data and anecdotes like this to support her vision. Progress on her larger goal of reducing global use of pesticides is tougher to demonstrate. Today Strey invariably pitches the idea that the greatest challenge facing agriculture is a lack of production. She often closes with a promise: “Software will eat the world. Plantix will feed the world.”

Silicon Valley–style venture capital places enormous emphasis on scale and a startup’s ability to grow rapidly, says Madeleine Fairbairn, a sociologist at UC Santa Cruz, who studies agriculture and food systems. “Everybody’s used to this claim that we have a growing population, and they’re going to starve if we don’t feed them,” she says.

Missing the forest for the trees, VC-backed agritech developers innovate tools that capitalize on a particular and seemingly simple deficiency in the existing system—they streamline a supply chain or provide farmers with more financing, for example. But along the way, they lose sight of what farmers need most.

PEAT, for instance, set out to reduce pesticide use among farmers, which since the Green Revolution has degraded 17 percent of Earth’s surface and annually poisons 44 percent of its farmers. Agronomists who have tried for decades to lessen reliance on synthetic chemicals understand that overuse of pesticides is rooted in more complex challenges, like community power dynamics, erratic weather, and labor shortages. But PEAT’s response was to produce a smartphone app that makes it easier for farmers to buy pesticides.

“In the end, we ended up with something which is quite traditional, which is ecommerce. We buy something, we store it in our warehouse, we sell it again,” Strey acknowledges. Does this actually make a difference in Indian agriculture, where underregulated agrochemical corporations advertise chemical inputs as the all-purpose fix for far more nuanced challenges? Even Plantix’s self-evaluation can only make a weak case for this.

The concern that Penas and others have raised is that this fresh take on a traditional e-platform might have succumbed to the age-old Jevons paradox: making it so easy for hundreds of millions of smallholders to buy pesticides that they buy more.

“Many founders are tempted to make propositions they ultimately may not be able to fully deliver on,” says Cornelius Heimstädt, a sociologist at Humboldt University of Berlin who researches Germany’s burgeoning agritech industry. But that is not necessarily a moral failure on their part, he says: It is often a result of the ecosystem from which they spawn.

For Fairbairn, this is a failure of imagination. “If the imperative for corporate and venture capital profit and rapid funder exit could be decentered from this drive for digital agriculture, it could potentially be something really amazing,” she says.

Some within the investment world are trying, explains David LeZaks, managing director of Food System 6, a California-based accelerator that invests in resilient food systems. One strategy, he says, is patient capital, where “investors realize that not all business plans go as expected, the market and the macroeconomic trends don’t always do what we think they’re going to do when we draw that curve on the piece of paper.” And startups are funded without the pressure to quickly turn a profit or die.

But venture capital’s aversion to serious risk—in the agricultural world, at least—has largely instead kept it in bed with Big Ag and favoring ventures that are bound to get bought up by them. Ventures like Plantix. In 2023, Helm AG bought the company for an undisclosed amount.

Strey told me the acquisition was a relief. Investment in agritech startups had taken a dive, and she was exhausted with the constant pitching needed to maintain her growing company. Helm had already invested in Plantix and was searching for ways to reach more smallholders. So when Helm’s CEO called to ask about working together more closely, she and the remaining founders agreed.

Plantix began its journey as an idea in the heads of people who recognized the problems with industrialized agriculture and explored ambitious ways of solving them. From the beginning, Strey maintains, they also wanted to build a successful business, the reality of which has led them to an app that makes it easy to do the easy thing, even if it’s not the best thing for people or the planet.

Asked if it’s possible for founders to maintain their vision for their startup while navigating the gauntlet of venture capital fundraising, Strey says, “It’s possible. On the other hand, I think it’s also healthy to question your vision.”