scoutlabs

Family farms, which make up 90 million farms globally, play a crucial role in food production but face numerous challenges, including economic struggles, climate change, and pest-related crop losses. Insects alone consume food equivalent to what 1 billion people eat annually, posing a severe threat to global food security. Climate change further worsens this issue by accelerating pest lifecycles, making traditional pest control methods ineffective and unsustainable. With already thin profit margins, family farms urgently need innovative solutions to maintain their livelihoods while ensuring sustainable agricultural practices.

To address these challenges, scoutlabs has developed an IoT-based digital trap network, integrating AI and machine learning to monitor and analyse pest populations in real-time. Its IoT devices capture daily high-resolution images of insect pests, analysed by AI and entomologists to provide precise pest pressure alerts. This cost-effective solution enables precision pesticide application, reducing chemical use, preserving beneficial insects, and preventing pesticide resistance. With an affordable subscription model and easy installation, the technology lowers costs and labor efforts for farmers. Through the Fast Track to Market programme, scoutlabs hopes to bridge their production cost financing gap, allowing them to scale rapidly. Thanks to this support, the company is achieving more than 10X growth from the 2024 to the 2025 agricultural season, enabling them to meet market demand and expand their impact in digital pest monitoring.