- AgNext Technologies founded by Taranjeet Singh Bhamra is a startup based in Punjab offering advanced solutions to the agriculture sector for quality assessment
- Qualix AI by AgNext is equipped with Spectrometry, Computer vision, and IoT Sensing solutions for Chemical, physical & ambient quality assessment of food
- Qualix can assess milk in just 30 seconds with adulteration, indicating health risk factor
With the growing demand for food supplies, quality often takes a back seat, and ensuring food safety is a challenging task. Existing quality inspection practices are subjective & also time-consuming to assess the quality of farm produce for our day-to-day food, beverages, and other foodstuffs. With the power of innovative AI-driven rapid quality assessment solution, Chandigarh based AgNext has taken up the onus to ensure the quality of agricultural produce.
Machine Maker spoke to Gurpreet Singh, Head of Marketing at AgNext Technologies on how the company helps the agribusinesses to procure & maintain their food quality, fair pricing to the farmers & ultimately winning the trust of end-users. With new technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Spectroscopy, and Computer Vision among others, combined onto a single platform, and led yet again, by a Punjab-based startup, AgNext.
Data-Driven Solutions for India: Story behind AgNext
AgNext Technologies was founded by Taranjeet Singh Bhamra, a graduate from IIT Kharagpur with a degree in Agricultural and Food engineering. Taran gathered knowledge in food manufacturing operations and commodity procurements, before pursuing an MBA from IIM Calcutta. After this, Taranjeet worked with global conglomerates in Europe and the Middle East in investment banking and strategy consulting for a while before he found his true calling from agriculture for revolutionizing it with the power of advanced technology.
In 2016, Taranjeet came back to India and started AgNext Technologies in Chandigarh. The startup was incubated at IIT-Kharagpur by the end of that year. AgNext has invested in establishing itself as a "data-driven solutions” company in the past four years to address quality challenges, traceability, and cost optimization using data and deploying these solutions.
A Movement Built on Innovations
Currently, AgNext offers a technology platform called Qualix for rapid commodity assessment solutions. The Qualix AI engine is equipped with spectrometry, computer vision, and IoT Sensing solutions, through an integrated hardware and software interface for accurate and instant quality analysis.
“We have given 3 years into product development before we came out with the best solution for the industry,” said Gurpreet. AgNext suite provides results using AI-based algorithms for instant quality analysis of commodities like grains, oilseeds, pulses, spices, milk, animal feed & tea, farmer-wise data for quality produce, managing suppliers by lots, and building business intelligence through quality maps.
AgNext has built devices that work with on-premise embedded cameras for the instant physical quality assessment using computer vision sciences & also using molecular sciences to check the chemical quality of the agri-commodities in the form of liquids, solids, powders, grains, or leaves.
AgNext has designed STQC mark sensors for temperature, humidity, vaporific emissions, and different parameters key for varied agriculture industries like activity solutions, grain silos, warehouses, food processors, and storage services. These offer period alerts on management parameters and information analytics for actions to be taken as devised by the analysis establishments for higher management of food quality.
Quality & Adulteration: Solutions for Real Challenges
Tea export from India is losing ground to countries like Kenya and Sri Lanka because of quality. Due to demand for quality often Fine Leaf Count (FLC) is compromised in the tea industry. The existing method of calculating Fine Leaf Count is manual which is highly prone to errors & ultimately leads to a loss in tea quality, AgNext’s computer vision technology can do the Fine Leaf Count of 1kg sample within 2 mins & with better repeatability & reproducibility.
Adulteration of milk is another major threat to health. Milk and milk products have been found with pollutants including palm oil, detergent, urea, caustic soda, and paint. Qualix can assess milk in just 30 seconds with data on composition indices like fat, SNF, Lactose, and Protein, as well as contamination indices like urea, detergent, starch, vegetable oil, and water paints. This is done using spectroscopy or chemical analysis to check for adulteration.
Founded in 2016 AgNext Technologies recently got the Startup Punjab Certificate, and offers innovative digital interventions to solve pressing issues in agriculture. It has introduced a unique platform of hardware, software, and analytics-as-a-service.
For more details, visit: https://agnext.com/