Village Link, a leading agritech startup based in Myanmar, was established with the aim of empowering the country’s agricultural and rural communities, as well as its numerous individual smallholder farmers, through the latest advancements in precision farming and mobile technology. It runs Htwet Toe, a leading agri-mobile app that links agricultural experts and professionals, farmers and services on a single platform. Additionally, the award-winning startup also operates a satellite-powered application called VLSS (VillageLink Satellite Service) that aims to empower the country’s businesses and organizations through precision farming methods and practices which can greatly increase their crop yields while preserving valuable resources.
Htwet Toe, or high yield, is an agri-mobile app that Village Link launched in 2018 that provides a single platform for connecting the country’s diverse farmers and rural smallholders to agricultural service providers and professionals, with the aim of creating a digital, borderless community that facilitates knowledge-sharing, as well as developing market access for the various stakeholders in the agricultural ecosystem. By enabling a platform for the free-flow of information exchange between farmers and experts, the startup has provided the country’s agricultural and rural communities an on-demand and easily accessible means of getting vital information, advice and solutions for overcoming their everyday agricultural challenges and issues.
However, Htwet Toe is also more than just a digital community platform for knowledge sharing. The app is actually integrated with powerful remote sensing technology that enables it to effectively double as a precision farming tool for farmers that is capable of delivering highly customized insights and relevant data pertaining to their topography, crop yields and other inter and intra-field variability in crops. Thus far, the app boasts more than 450,000 users on its platform. The startup claims that its Htwet Toe app has helped farmers and rural smallholders to address and overcome more than 40,000 issues and problems via its questions and answers feature, and that its market information updates and technical advice features have already accumulated a substantial number of views since its launch, totalling more than 19 million views.
The startup also maintains a satellite-enabled app, the VLSS, which utilizes satellite data – including satellite-based specific aperture radar (SAR) data, geospatial modelling and agri-focused satellite imagery – to model, visualize and aggregate data feeds to provide key insights and personalized solutions to businesses and companies in order to keep them better informed as well as to enhance their decision making capabilities and operations. The innovative startup managed to obtain a special grant from the Netherland Space Agency that allows them to leverage on advanced satellite imagery and data with the purpose of transforming and innovating Myanmar’s agriculture industry. Currently, the platform offers a broad range of services, such as flood monitoring, localized weather monitoring and various crop-related tracking metrics that ultimately bring value to the numerous stakeholders in Myanmar’s agri-value chain. Village Link is expected to debut the VLSS platform and dashboard sometime in early 2020.
Village Link, the precision farming-focused agritech startup, managed to win the Best Foodtech/Agritech Startup award at the recently concluded ASEAN Rice Bowl Startup Awards that was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Notably, the Myanmar-based startup dedicated its award to the country’s hard working farmers, saying that they are the real heroes in driving the nation forward towards technology adoption and change.
