REMEMBER the usual cycles of bird diseases that used to surface in winters every once in a while and ruined all your chicken biryani plans? Not anymore (or least unlikely) if you take the word of Poulta, which helps detect, predict and prevent poultry diseases.

Poulta is a local agritech startup, with roots in Sehwan, that uses internet of things and real-time analytics to make poultry farming data driven and thus help avoid outbreaks or mass casualties.

How, you ask? The startup installs internet of things-enabled sensors in the sheds which monitor three parameters: air quality, water quality and equipment efficiency. Any concerning increase in, let’s say, the humidity levels, change in water’s pH or performance of machinery will generate a notification there and then, thus alerting the farmers to act upon it before things get bad. Through an online platform, farm workers/owners can remotely keep track of things in real time

Not only that, they are also trying to use the same approach to streamline poultry logistics. With the use of sensors again, this time monitoring factors like car speed, shocks etc, Poulta gives data insights to farmers on how to minimise losses and make their supply chain more efficient. In a nutshell, it’s a SaaS enterprise resource planner for poultry farms that lets them monitor their facilities, flock, logistics among other things.

For those like me, who don’t (or didn’t) have a clue about what goes in a poultry farm and are mostly concerned about their steady dose of fried chicken, let me give it a shot. So basically, there are large sheds which can accommodate around 60,000-70,000 birds and have a controlled environment suitable for chickens. To monitor all that, there are sensors and the on-ground staff collects data like daily mortality, bird count, food conversion ratio among other things.

That said, what exactly does Poulta bring in to the industry? “The current approach of poultry farms is very reactive. They only take any measures once something has happened and do investigations. There is no real-time monitoring and whatever data that exists is usually fragmented and this is where we come in: by providing an online platform where they have everything related to their farms,” explains Poulta Chief Executive Officer Ali Murtaza Solangi.

“The world over, poultry farms are quite scattered across different geographical areas and as a result, the data they collect is very disorganised and unstructured to get any insights out of it. Poulta gives them real-time data, notifications and a one-stop dashboard where they have access to all relevant data, ranging from flock to environmental quality, in a single place,” he adds.

The idea occurred when Solangi, a software engineer, was chatting with a poultry farm owner friend who had lost 70,000 birds in a single day and realised this could easily be controlled through the use of internet of things and data.

While Poulta as a solution has been in existence for about a year and was under the umbrella of a parent company called DigNous, it was only a month or so ago that they branded it as a separate commercial entity. Solangi is joined by his co-founder Muhammad Hanif Lashari, who has an electronics background and now looks after the engineering department.

The startup got a kickstart earlier this year when it was selected for the USAID-funded Global Acceleration Programme and had the chance to spend three months in Silicon Valley, where Solangi also got the company registered. That’s not all, it also helped them raise a seed round from Tim Draper, a celebrity investor in the US with stakes in the likes of Skype, Tesla and Twitter.

Let’s talk about the market though; how much meat is in it anyway? According to Solangi, the annual turnover from the industry is around Rs750 billion whereas independent figures from a few years ago also put its worth close to $4bn, with a sustained growth trajectory. Globally, it’s even bigger with the total size presumably around $2 trillion, with S accounting for almost one-fifth of that.

So what are Solangi’s plans for tapping on such a huge industry? “We first want to test our product in Pakistan and fine tune everything before moving to Saudi Arabia in around six months and then the United States in another six, where we are already in talks with potential clients through our investor,” he informs. As of now, Poulta has some 25 plus sheds in Pakistan through five customers.

What good is the market without monetisation though, so let’s turn towards that. Despite Poulta’s SaaS model, it doesn’t have a monthly subscription model in Pakistan as the CEO says the market is not yet ready here. Instead, they charge an upfront $5,000 for hardware installation and software in the first year, and from then onwards, $1,000 each for hardware support and portal’s access. As for international frontier, the company wants to stick to a monthly subscription service.

The meat in the market is quite tempting for sure, and it’s only up to the founder to not chicken out.

The writer is member of staff:
m.mutaherkhan@gmail.com
Twitter: @MutaherKhan

Published in Dawn, September 22nd, 2019