Cropin to help Walmart enhance supply chain resilience

Bengaluru-based agritech firm Cropin on Friday announced its partnership with global retailer Walmart to enhance the latter's US and South American sourcing operations.

This collaboration provides Walmart with proactive intelligence for sourcing and securing supply chains, enabling data-driven decisions to balance cost, quality, and sustainability. That said, to address climate challenges and supply chain vulnerabilities, Walmart will leverage Cropin's Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered platform to transform sourcing, enhance supply chain resilience, and optimise operations.

In an interaction with TechCircle, Krishna Kumar, founder and chief executive officer at Cropin, said that the deployment aims to enhance scalable sourcing solutions across Walmart's US and South American markets. “Cropin's agri-intelligence platform optimises the fresh produce supply chain by improving yield forecasting, monitoring crop health, and predicting seasonal shifts with greater precision. This mitigates risks related to weather, market volatility, and supply chain disruptions, ensuring a steady supply of high-quality perishables, reducing waste, and improving product availability,” he added.

On the technology front, Kumar explained that by leveraging AI, satellite data, and real-time farm insights, Cropin's platform delivers accurate predictions regarding harvest, yield, and quality. “This predictive intelligence enhances product availability and minimises waste by enabling effective procurement planning, proactive alerts on crop health, and optimised inventory management that aligns field data with market demand. Real-time visibility also increases supply chain agility by enabling adaptive sourcing and rerouting to mitigate disruptions,” he added.

Founded in 2010, Cropin has digitised 30 million acres of farmland, impacting over 7 million farmers globally, through work with more than 100 B2B customers. Cropin Cloud is powered by its crop knowledge graph, encompassing 500 crops and 10,000 varieties across 103 countries.

Cropin's platform, backed by Google, offers detailed insights into crop health, pest outbreaks, and weather risks, strengthening climate resilience and enabling effective yield prediction and pricing management. It also features a sustainability dashboard for tracking GHG emissions, water usage, and deforestation impact for regulatory compliance.

Walmart's Vice President of Sourcing Innovation and Surety of Supply, Kyle Carlyle, noted that this collaboration will streamline sourcing practices and improve yield prediction using Cropin's real-time AI technology, aligning with Walmart's agricultural innovation goals.

Cropin is expanding solutions tailored to CPG and food retail, in a bid to transform food systems, future-proofing supply chains, promote sustainable sourcing, empower farmers with advanced technologies, and address climate-related disruptions, said Kumar on the company’s future plans.

The company is also strengthening its presence in key markets such as the US, Latin America, and Europe, recently expanding into the Netherlands.

Going forward, Cropin is further developing AI-driven innovations, including a real-time Gen AI-powered agri-intelligence platform and a Micro Language Model (µ-LM) for Climate-Smart Agriculture, investing in emerging Agri-Informed Neural Networks (AINN) to advance the industry.