Bangaluru-based agritech startup Cropin Technology today announced the launch of ‘akṣara’, the sector’s first purpose-built open-source (Apache 2.0 License and with no restrictions) Micro Language Model (µ-LM) for climate-smart agriculture.

Built on Mistral’s foundational model, the micro language model is designed to address the problems faced by the underserved farming communities in the Global South by removing barriers to knowledge and empowering anyone in the agriculture ecosystem to build frugal and scalable AI solutions for the sector.

Cropin aims to empower agricultural stakeholders, developers, and researchers to tackle global challenges like food security, climate change, resource conservation – water and soil, regenerative agriculture practices amongst others by providing access to contextual, factual, and actionable information.

Out of the world’s 600 million farms, five out of six are small, covering less than two hectares each. Despite operating on only about 12 percent of agricultural land, these small farms produce roughly 35 percent of the world’s food.

The goal is to enable AI investments to have a significant impact and to make AI accessible to everyone in the ecosystem, including academia, development agencies, governments, and agricultural enterprises, to empower farmers worldwide, beginning with the smallholders in the global south.

Krishna Kumar, founder & CEO, Cropin said in an era where Large Language Models are reshaping jobs, businesses, and customer interactions, the spotlight is now on industry-specific models trained on niche and comprehensive domain data as the ‘next big thing.’

These models can potentially transform agriculture, paving the way for a new era of tech-driven farming in a sector that has traditionally seen limited technological advancement. Domain-specific AI models for agriculture are expected to attract significant investments, offering a practical and economically viable approach to food systems transformation.