Twelve startups, including van der Kamp's Cropper, were accepted into the Co.Launch cohort this fall. The members participated in a three-month program with weekly sessions to assist them in building their startups.
The Co.Launch program culminates December 5th with a finale night, where a few selected companies will pitch their ideas to the judges. Those who make the finale have a chance to win $15,000 and a spot in the next Co.Labs cohort.
Cropper is a University of Saskatchewan-based startup providing precision agriculture solutions for the global seed sector. Researchers can use PlotVision, an image analysis SaaS product developed at the university’s Plant Phenotyping and Imaging Research Center (P2IRC), to gain faster, cheaper, better insights about their crop varieties than ever before.
Though this project started as part of the P2IRC project, business development partners at GIFS have been eager to help van der Kamp spin the project into a tech venture.
When asked if he ever thought he’d ever be an entrepreneur, van der Kamp replied “I’ve thought about it… I’m still don’t know if I’m necessarily the right person for it but I’m certainly enjoying the ride.”
The most valuable lesson he has taken away from Co.Launch came from one of the first assignments in the program. "They give you a task – you have to contact 75 potential clients and get their feedback and figure out if they’re likely to buy it or not. You had to do it within a couple weeks." Receiving a lot of good feedback both from industry breeding companies and university research programs was an encouraging start to his Co.Launch experience.
van der Kamp quickly recognized that transitioning from a university project to an industry-ready product requires some significant changes. For example, the PlotVision system needed to be expanded to support the diverse dataset structures that are used by different drones and camera systems.
With the product already being utilized by a user in the States and at the University of Saskatchewan, the Cropper team is getting ready to grow their business next summer. Already in talks with several mid-size prospective clients, van der Kamp sees next summer as a potential breakout year for Cropper, which will prove that the product is a worthwhile investment for plant breeders. The end goal is to have a profitable and scalable business that revolutionizes the way plant breeding is done.
Of the 12 startups in this round of Co.Launch, van der Kamp's Cropper was chosen as one of three finalists. He will be giving his pitch at the Co.Launch finale is this Thursday, December 5th from 5:30 - 8:30pm at the Delta Bessborough hotel. Free event tickets are still available on EventBrite.
Co.Launch was created in partnership with Innovation Saskatchewan and Innovation Enterprise U of S. It is a province-wide accelerator for early-stage tech startups in Saskatchewan.