United States-based agricultural tech company Wingsure has launched a coffee-focused platform that uses artificial intelligence, computer vision and geospatial tools to create evolving digital records of individual coffee farms.
Called Wingsure Coffea, the system is designed to capture and verify farm-level information through smartphones, then help translate the information for specific purposes such as sustainability reporting, production monitoring, financing and agricultural insurance.
Although Wingsure’s pitch appears geared toward coffee buyers and other downstream actors, the platform’s central premise is that coffee farmers are often asked to provide overlapping information to buyers, certifiers, sustainability programs, lenders and insurers. Wingsure said Coffea is designed to replace some of that duplication with a single farm record that is updated over time.
“A farm cannot be understood through a periodic form, a declaration or a satellite image alone,” Wingsure Founder and CEO Avi Basu said in an announcement of the launch. “It is a living system.”
In the field, Coffea uses smartphone-based augmented-reality prompts and multilingual voice tools to guide data collection. Observations can be geotagged, timestamped and captured offline, then combined with satellite and other geospatial information.
Wingsure says the approach is intended to create a farm record that can be updated over time, rather than relying on repeated surveys or one-time declarations. The idea is that record can then be targeted to potential coffee buyers, lenders, sustainability programs or insurers, among other actors.
Colombia Connection
The launch announcement includes support from the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC), although neither organization announced a formal commercial partnership.
FNC Technical Manager Álvaro Gaitán said the organization is “engaging with Wingsure to explore” how the technology might complement its existing systems.
Colombia already has one of the coffee sector’s most extensive farm-level information systems. As DCN reported earlier this year, the FNC’s Coffee Information System, known as SICA, contains georeferenced information on approximately 1.8 million coffee plots and socioeconomic information on nearly 500,000 coffee-growing families.
The FNC has been expanding those capabilities as coffee companies prepare for increased traceability demands, including the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). The federation has also said it is incorporating artificial intelligence into SICA.
The Wingsure launch comes amid a broader proliferation of digital traceability and farm-monitoring systems throughout the coffee sector.
In June, Fairtrade International launched its Plot Insights platform for coffee and cocoa cooperatives, combining farm geolocation information with deforestation-risk analysis. Other recent efforts include the Coffee Canopy Partnership, a project involving multiple multinational coffee companies that is using high-resolution satellite imagery and AI to map coffee-growing lands.
From Farm Insurance to Coffee
As a business, Wingsure emerged from SRI, the California research institute formerly known as Stanford Research Institute.
When SRI announced Wingsure in 2021, the startup was primarily focused on using AI, augmented reality and mobile technology to provide agricultural insurance to small-scale farmers. Its technology has since expanded into crop monitoring, sustainability verification, credit and other agricultural applications.
The company says its work has reached more than 500,000 farmers across agricultural programs, although it has not disclosed how many coffee farms are currently using Coffea.
Wingsure did not announce pricing, commercial availability or specific coffee companies using the new platform.
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