Harvesting Inc Uses AI to Assess Credit Risk for Farm Lenders

This week, Silicon Valley-based Harvesting Inc launched an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-backed platform that uses satellite images of farms to gauge credit risk for banks that lend to farmers. The technology can be used to capture data on farms in the developing world as well as in mature markets like the US. Harvesting Inc generates "credit scorecards" using satellite imagery of farms and other data points, already in the works in the African market. "Think of us as someone who calculates the language of agriculture [into] the language of finance," Garg said. Garg told deBanked that because small farmers in emerging markets don't have credit cards, let alone smartphones, they have no credit history and their creditworthiness can't be evaluated through a traditional Western banking system.