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Throughout her technical career, Miku has been a relentless entrepreneur. Initially, she was working with Aroidata as a founding engineer, which later got acquired by Xyratex in 2006. Her next venture came with VMware, where she worked on various ground-breaking, innovative products—one of which was the leading industry’s first mobile virtualization initiative in collaboration with MIT. She was part of the leadership team at Worklight—a cross-platform mobile app development company—which was acquired by IBM in 2012.
In 2016, she was leading IBM’s Internet of Things initiative and was also working with multiple start-ups focused on bringing automation by irrigation sensors to tackle the issue of droughts. In the same year, both California and India were experiencing multiple droughts.
Miku started spending most of her job time shadowing growers and witnessing food supply chain operations; she witnessed that there was a lack of access to basic information and technology gap in the supply chain. This drove her to the sole vision of closing the gap between technology and the food supply chain and this series of events led her to start AgShift.
Miku comes from a small farm holder community back in India. While she was growing up, she saw the difficulties and challenges of farming—on daily basis. Her childhood experiences and motivation to bring transformation in agriculture led to the formation of AgShift. Sharing her experiences, she says, “Technology is only a means to an end for the food supply chain. What is needed is the ability to solve some of the daunting problems faced by organizations in the food supply chain. With AgShift, if we can reduce 1% of total food waste, then it is worth 100% of the effort in doing so.”
Today, food supply chains across the U.S face several challenges related to food quality assessments, which result from archaic manual processes. Three of the biggest problems of manual quality assessments are: 1) the inability to maintain quality consistency; 2) rising labor costs; 3) the lack of an audit trail that could help reduce claims and recalls.
AgShift has built the industry’s leading, patented, AI-enabled system to automate batch inspections for selected commodities in fresh produce and edible nuts.
“Our unique technology stack comprising of deep learning, computer vision, artificial intelligence, IoT scalable AI platforms allows for rapid extension to 100s of commodities in fresh produce, edible nuts, and sea-food categories. Our solution offers better, faster, and more objective inspections at scale with a verifiable audit trail. Every organization in the food supply chain will benefit from our autonomous quality assessment,” adds Miku.
AgShift was established with the mission to improve the quality assessment of food with accurate and pre-emptive quality assessment, resulting in a significant reduction in food waste across the supply chain. Annually, in North America, 58 million tons or 33% of total food waste occurs across the supply chain in the post-harvest, processing, and distribution phases. In the U.S. alone, inconsistent food quality assessment costs $15.6 billion in lost sales for food growers, packers, shippers, distributors, and retailers, who are already dealing with low margins. Observing these data, AgShift’s innovative approach and solution can significantly reduce recalls and food waste due to inconsistent quality assessment.
Currently, the COVID-19 crisis has significantly impacted the food industry and has revealed several hidden truths about it. Food supply chains are operating on thin margins and this year has been relentless as they are unable to get the manual help essential to complete the quality assessment. However, the production of food will not stop as it is one of the essential business, especially in a situation like COVID-19. Consequently, several organizations are operating at 25% of their capacity due to the unavailability of enough manual labor for quality inspections. This has directly impacted the number of samples for inspection—reduced in huge number—emphasizing huge pressure on the supply chain.
Solutions like Agshift are imperative for tackling this crisis and for the upcoming future. “Though in the short term, this of course continues to impact our business, the long-term value of automation now resonates with our customer base,” states Miku. Furthermore, during the COVID-19 phase, the company has taken several vital steps to minimize the expense, consolidate the team as much as possible, and also to double down on the engineering R&D. By staying focused, Miku and her team have been able to commercialize the solution with multiple customers despite the pandemic. This validates the products and solutions and motivates the whole ecosystem.
With the beginning of the crisis, the leadership role transformed too. The new normal demanded an upgraded version of the leader. Acknowledging the adverse effects of the outbreak, Miku is aware of the distress and anxiety followed which may affect the workforce. From day one, she follows the culture of transparency throughout the team. Miku treats the team as family and shares every feedback, issue, and company status with them to keep everyone on the same page. The team of AgShift is a skillful group of competent individuals. Also, ownership is one of the most important traits that Miku searches for in every team member. She adds, “If there is no ownership, then there is always someone or something to pass the buck to – which is a disaster for any start-up because there are not enough people or time to pass on the responsibility.”
‘Learn from the mistakes’ and Miku has too. She cited one of her ex-CTOs who lacked competency, transparency, and hindered the company’s future: “The problem was that his incompetency went unchecked for a long time due to my personal biases and the trait of giving people enough chances and time to prove themselves,” she added. Since then, Miku has evolved as a leader and understands that as a frontrunner, one has to make tough decisions, overcoming personal biases every day.
Miku advises the same to the aspirants. Despite the unforeseen events like COVID-19, as a founder/entrepreneur/leader, one should be honest to themselves and answer the question- why are you doing it? “It takes a lot out of an early-stage entrepreneur – there is no security in any aspects – people, employees, customers, investors, payroll, office space – you are responsible for all of it. This gets pretty lonely, on a daily basis – so the reassessment is important.”
Being honest to yourself and owning your actions will assist every aspirant on the quest for a successful venture. Miku concludes by sharing one of her favorite quotes that influence her every day—“In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.”
