SMAPP LAB was founded with a passion for creating the world’s first affordable and scalable insect monitoring technology to help farmers grow more with less. After three years of development and research, they created the SMAPP LAB Mini product line, which can monitor more than 180 different insects.
SMAPP LAB provides an example of never getting satisfied with what you have already reached with your business. The founders around the age of 20 decided that agriculture is a territory worth considering when thinking about innovation. “We came up with the idea back in 2019 and a year later the start-up was founded. We began to get validation for the solution – explains Anna Bereczki, one of the founders of the agritech company. – Since then we launched the business in 10 different countries and have been monitoring the activity of insect pesticides in about 250,000 hectares.”
SMAPP LAB has created the world’s first affordable and scalable insect monitoring technology to help farmers protect their crops from pesticides. Their solution is more than a digital smart trap, it is a malware monitoring service: they don’t just collect data, they also analyse them and provide decision support for farmers and determine the most optimal time for spraying.
The team now is committed to grow their business further. The use of satellite images and their integration is becoming more and more widespread in the agriculture, so they decided to grow towards the space sector.
“Our goal is to cover areas where cellular data service is not available. This led us to the ESA BIC Hungary programme, where we realised the need of satellite-based communication. This way, we will be able to help farmers all over the world by integrating field-level and satellite data into our forecast models.”
Besides growing their business in a technological sense, SMAPP LAB will be able to fulfill their ambition of having 1 million devices around the world in the next 5 years. Their customers already include the world’s top pesticide manufacturing companies and large farms from all over the world. The company participated in several renowned accelerator programmes and got the second place at the Vodafone Digital Award in 2021, was among the top 5% of 800 start-ups in the last round of Start-up Chile, was featured in Hungary’s TOP 100 innovations in agriculture in 2022 and in 2023 was nominated as one of the CEE Start-ups of The Month.
“The ESA BIC programme is an excellent opportunity for us to reach further and create the first prototypes that are already capable of satellite data communication and thus test the coverage capabilities of the updated solution. We want to validate the integration of the retrieved satellite data into our database and models.”
