Reporter Observes Jifei In The Eyes Of Investors: "Agriculture + AI" Has Huge Imagination Space For Future Agricultural Science And Technology

Zhai Shaohui

As a capital management partner, Kang Kai is a round a investor of Jifei technology.

Talking about the process of getting to know Peng bin and investing in Jifei, Kang Kai joked: "I didn't get any money after seven years of starting my business. Is this company a little slow?"

KANGYI is one of the investors who paid attention to the hardware field earlier in China. At the beginning of 2014, one of his geeks recommended it to a friend of Guangzhou. Just after the Spring Festival, Kang Kai made a "cold call" and the two sides established contact. On April 1 of that year, the seventh anniversary of the founding of Jifei, Peng bin sent an email to Kang Kai to confirm the cooperation.

Kang believes that Jifei's past exploration has accumulated unmanned DNA and attention to service for the company, "Jifei is a well-established company".

About half a year after the initial financing, Jifei chose the "all in" agricultural track. The reporter asked Kang whether he was worried at that time? Kang's answer is: "not at all worried."

The consensus is that when many people think that Jifei should "play the market" and "compete", or think that UAV can be a "accessory" of smart phones, both sides believe that UAV should be an industry. This industry, especially in the field of segmentation, has great opportunities.

Kang stressed that he paid more attention to the team's persistence, landing, practical work and seizing the opportunity. "If you think about the risks first, don't start a business. Entrepreneurship is a process of exploration. " "We're very optimistic about the idea of (UAV) enterprise applications, and of course we're going to end up in agriculture," he said Kang also mentioned in particular that Jifei already has the most basic engineering agricultural data in China's agricultural system. "Whoever has such data today will be able to produce greater value in the future agricultural revolution, which can not be ignored."

Baidu capital and Softbank vision Fund II are the leading investors in the latest round of financing announced by Jifei on November 16.

Hu Tianhang, managing director of Baidu capital, insists that "the road of Jifei is still very long". Baidu group has a large amount of investment in machine learning and driverless fields, and plays a key role in the industry. Therefore, baidu capital also pays attention to the project of deep ploughing artificial intelligence and automation.

During the first meeting with Peng bin, Hu Tianhang was most impressed by the precise farmland map formed by the scanning of the polar remote sensing aircraft on the computer screen. "Just like autonomous driving landing in the city, it also needs accurate positioning. It is impossible to do without a set of basic data facilities. I think the future growth of Jifei will be based on this infrastructure. "

Even if the team of Tianhang has not realized the opportunity yet. In the future, in the field of business model and segmentation, there is still a lot of room for imagination of agricultural science and technology.

Xu Juan, partner of Softbank vision fund, stressed the opportunities in the agricultural field: China is an agricultural country with 20% of the global population, but only 8% of the world's arable land. The progress of urbanization and the aging of rural population make agriculture urgently need the changes brought about by science and technology. She pointed out that the series of agricultural science and technology products continuously developed and launched by Jifei have formed an ecological closed loop of smart agriculture.

Innovation factory is one of the following investors in the latest round of financing of Jifei. Li Kaifu, chairman and CEO of Innovation workshop, pointed out that deep learning and other algorithms cut into all walks of life to produce the effect of "+ AI", and unmanned automatic AI began to appear around people. Today, these two major artificial intelligence trends are merging into one, and Jifei is a very typical example. Li Kaifu said that Jifei team is the "entrepreneur with technical strength and willing to roll up his sleeves to learn from the industry and deeply solve the industry pain points".

Li Kaifu believes that in the past, due to the lack of infrastructure, available data and appropriate sensors, AI has been difficult to rapidly implement in the agricultural field. Now, with the popularization of various technologies to villages and towns, the cloud computing and big data foundation has gradually matured, and "Ai + agriculture" is becoming possible. He also stressed that Jifei's product matrix is further building smart agricultural ecology, and its products and services have great application potential and innovation opportunities in the strong demand scenario of agricultural transformation.

"What's unique is that the team has been able to put down the aura of science and technology, and thoroughly understand the traditional agriculture that it didn't understand at all and was not particularly" cool. " "The whole ecosystem and today's products come from the hard work of the team and the understanding of the industry after years of close contact with agriculture," Li said. This is called "agriculture + AI."

The reporter also exchanged views with investors who had not participated in the financing of Jifei.

It is pointed out that although the size of the company is relatively small, it can not compete with other large-scale companies in a timely manner. In the development process of Jifei, it is "good to turn around when the ship is small". In addition, Jifei also has a first mover advantage. "In fact, all people have to step on the pit when they enter some industries, and the road will be wider if they step on it. It will be more difficult if you step into a pit in the face of fierce competition. " She said.

When talking about the choice of "all in" agriculture of Jifei technology, she said it was a "very big transformation". In terms of type, it is a shift from "to C" to "B" in the past, which requires a completely different sales model; from the industry point of view, it is from the model aircraft and UAVs to enter into a broader agriculture, which requires a deep enough understanding of the new industry. "This requires a strong learning ability of the team, or the participation of senior industry experts." "I believe they have made a lot of efforts in both areas," Huang said

It is true. In 2015, talents with agricultural background began to join Jifei. The team had a good understanding of rice, cotton, wheat and other crops, and established a data model. Although the team composition is still dominated by talents with backgrounds of automation control, robotics, big data and artificial intelligence, Jifei also intends to recruit talents from rural areas. Compared with young people growing up in cities, they are not only more familiar with crops, but also more enthusiastic to participate in a cause that can change their hometown.

In most people's impression, there seems to be some distance between "agriculture" and "cutting-edge technology". To some extent, the attraction of agricultural technology companies to high-end talents may be weaker than that of "cool" technology enterprises. However, millions of college students come out of rural China every year. In Peng Bin's words, they grew up in the countryside and wanted to change the "future" of their hometown. In his opinion, it may also become one of the "barriers" in the talent competition between Jifei and other companies in the future.

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