Instacrops is a sustainable and innovative agricultural technology company. They’re going to show off their innovative water-saving and crop-boosting AI solutions at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. Mario Bustamante started the company to improve agricultural practices across Latin America. This is especially important as it focuses on high-value specialty crops including apples, avocados, blueberries, almonds, and cherries.
The firm provides an award-winning chatbot app, which plugs right into WhatsApp in the background. This amazing technology allows farmers to get up-to-the-minute irrigation recommendations directly to their phones. Instacrops leverages state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to analyze over 80 parameters. These comprise inputs such as soil moisture, air humidity, temperature, atmospheric pressure, crop yield and NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index). The AI engine analyzes over 15 million data points each hour. This broad analysis is what enables it to provide highly localized, personalized recommendations directly to farmers.
Instacrops installs new Internet of Things (IoT) sensors as well as plugging into existing networks on farms. This enables them to increasingly monitor and operate irrigation systems remotely on smart farms. Farmers are better able to use less water by applying it only where conditions dictate on a field by field basis. Their $1 billion positive impact As the company proudly claims on its website, their technology has enabled 260 farms to reduce water use by 30%. Simultaneously, on these farmlands, crop yields have increased up to 20%.
The scarcity of water is a major concern here,” Bustamante said. His passion for solving this global challenge is fueling Instacrops advance technologies solutions. The company’s technology is a clear fit in more water-scarce areas. In places such as India and Chile, it saves more than 90% of water.
Farmers subscribe to Instacrops’ irrigation insights via a yearly payment based on the number of hectares of farmland they own. This model protects farmers and enables them to take advantage of current technology without enormous clean tech. As part of its next phase of growth strategy, Instacrops is making plans to become a completely WhatsApp-based platform in the next 12 months.
“I think in the next year, we will be 100% WhatsApp because it’s a universal tool for any farmer,” Bustamante noted. This expansion further demonstrates the company’s commitment to bringing cutting-edge agricultural technology within reach of more and more farmers.
Instacrops was part of the Y Combinator summer 2021 batch. Since its launch, it’s gained investment from SVG Ventures and Genesis Ventures. Their featured demonstration at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 will illustrate this young company’s cutting-edge model for sustainable and profitable agriculture. It will demonstrate how this radically new approach is ripe to transform agriculture across Latin America.