In this podcast series, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding Alt Proteins in 2025 and uncovers the investment playbooks of successful Climate Tech CEOs and Leading VCs.
Podcast Host Alex Shandrovksy is a strategic advisor to numerous global food tech accelerators and companies, including alternative proteins and cellular agriculture leaders. His focus is on investor relations and post-raise scale for agrifood tech companies. This podcast is syndicated through our media partners, Foodtech Weekly and Vegconomist.
Episode 36: CropMind
In this episode, I speak with Damilare and Rillwan, co-founders of CopMind, a startup using computer vision to help permanent crop growers—like apple and grape farmers—accurately estimate yield. Based in New Brunswick, Canada, the team raised $500K from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation and BKL Capital. They share how they built the company from a master’s thesis, cold-called dozens of farmers, and co-developed the product directly with end users. We explore their grassroots fundraising strategy, association-driven go-to-market playbook, and why their “farmer-first” approach—rooted in empathy, technical precision, and local ecosystem partnerships—is what sets them apart in agtech.
Key Facts CropMind:
- Goal: To enable tree fruit farmers (e.g. apples, grapes) to better estimate yields using computer vision — improving supply forecasting and operational planning.
- Recently raised $500K from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation and BKL Capital.
Alex’s Top Findings:
- Cold Outreach with High Empathy and Research. They contacted farmers through cold emails, calls, and in-person visits — always customized based on real research and communicated with humility. “ We could lay our hands on email, quote, calling, going to the orchard. First, do your research about that particular firm. Even though it’s a cold email, try to say one or two things you know about their farm.”
- Academic Origins: From Master’s Project to Real Business. The venture started as a master’s thesis in Technology Management at the University of New Brunswick and evolved into a commercial product. “ So we did a technology management program at UMB. Our research was focused on agriculture, a tech innovation. We initially started working on this from the university, and we’ve done a bit of extensive research at that point. We’ve even built something for testing. So after university, we have now started to think of how to make it much more, real, and we had to quit our jobs, start working on this.”
- Valuation Grounded in Traction. While it was a SAFE/pre-seed round (not priced), they supported valuation with early product-market fit, LoIs, and real usage metrics. “ We had to do some estimates based on certain activities within the organization. For instance, we have a product that was raised. Also, in terms of the value of the product market potential, that has to be factored in when investors want to estimate and say you should like this because of this market potential barrier to entry in the industry. So these are like more qualitative and some quantitative information that we used to support the estimates.”
Link to Apple Podcast here.
Catch the full podcast series here.
