Sooraj Krishna came to this problem from the outside. A researcher in human AI interaction, he had no background in coffee and no connection to planting families. What he brought instead was a habit of looking at systems and asking why they worked the way they did.

The two had met during their master's studies in India and later worked together at the same research organisation before leaving for their PhDs. A lot of their conversations would be about the coffee sector, both from their perspectives. Over time, those conversations began to move from observations to possibilities.

NeuBiom grew out of those conversations. When the founders returned to India, their goal was to close this gap. Not by advising farmers, not by running training programmes, but by building a data infrastructure that sits across the entire coffee value chain and makes visible what has always been hidden.

Two perspectives and A Whiteboard

The two founders first met during their master’s studies and later worked together at the same research organisation before eventually moving abroad for their PhDs. During this time, Sooraj Babu was pursuing his PhD in Germany, while Sooraj Krishna was working as a research scientist in Europe. Whenever Krishna visited, he noticed the same thing: a whiteboard filled edge to edge with handwritten notes, ideas about coffee, farmers, value chains, and possible interventions, all slowly taking shape.

Krishna was, by his own telling, an unlikely person to end up in coffee. He did not come from a planting family, and he was not even a coffee drinker when they first began exploring the space. What he brought instead was his work in human–AI interaction, where technology was not treated as a ready-made solution, but as a tool for understanding people. That perspective would later shape how they approached the coffee sector.

Being an outsider allowed him to question assumptions that others often took for granted. When the two eventually returned to India, they began spending time with growers, processors, and buyers across Wayanad, trying to understand the system from the ground up rather than designing solutions from a distance.

These experiences also shaped how they approached building. Krishna had seen enough technology projects fail at the adoption stage to recognise a familiar pattern: products designed without users in mind often end up needing explanation rather than being used naturally.

“Any technology, if you present it as a solution and just think of it as a ready-to-solve problem, then it doesn't get translated into an impact on the ground,” says Sooraj Krishna.

This became the founding logic of everything they built. Before the product had a name, it had a process: go to the people first.

Genesis of NeuBiom

The name NeuBiom has two meanings, both of which reflect where the company began. The first comes from language and geography. Neu is the German word for novel, and biome refers to the biological world. Together, the names suggest a novel approach to agriculture. The founders spent several years in Germany and worked with German collaborators, including Prof. Harald Bolsinger, who helped shape their early strategy with their Founders for Future framework. The name, in that sense, carries a part of that journey.

The second meaning is quieter and rooted in the idea of preserving knowledge before it disappears. Much of coffee cultivation relies on experience built over decades. Farmers learn how to read a coffee plant, adjust for a particular slope, or recognise from the colour of a leaf that something is wrong. This knowledge often lives with individuals and is passed down informally. When the farmer who holds that knowledge is gone, the knowledge can disappear as well. NeuBiom was conceived, in part, as a way to preserve that expertise.

The name also reflects a commitment the company makes to itself. NeuBiom is not a generic agri-tech platform applied to coffee. Every model, index, and advisory they produce is specific to coffee, with separate tuning for Arabica and Robusta, and built with agronomists who specialise in the crop. In a space where many technologies are designed as general solutions, that specificity is one of the things that sets them apart.

Targeting the Core

If the name NeuBiom reflected a commitment to preserving knowledge and building specifically for coffee, the problem they kept encountering showed why that commitment mattered. The more time the founders spent in the field, the clearer it became that coffee was not a simple commodity to navigate. From the moment a cherry is picked until it reaches a cup, it moves through growers, farmer-producer organisations, curing works, roasters, buyers, and cafes. At each stage, decisions shape quality, traceability, and price. Yet across much of this chain, the information needed to make those decisions well does not exist in any organised form.

For Sooraj Babu, this gap was not abstract. Growing up, he had seen it firsthand on his father’s farm and among classmates whose families grew coffee in Wayanad and Kodagu. Two farmers working similar land could produce dramatically different results. The difference was rarely the land itself, but the approach shaped by years of accumulated knowledge that one farmer possessed and another did not.

Higher up the value chain, the lack of visibility became even more pronounced. A curing works hoping to consistently source a particular quality profile had no structured data to guide them. Farmer-producer organisations, positioned to support small growers, often functioned mainly as traders, procuring coffee and selling it onward without visibility into the land or practices behind what they aggregated. A specialty cafe wanting to source organic coffee from a specific region had no reliable way to find it or verify it. The knowledge existed, but it was scattered across individual farmers who had built it over decades. There was no infrastructure to make that knowledge visible or shareable across the chain.

This brought the founders back to the same idea behind the name NeuBiom. If knowledge was disappearing or remaining fragmented, the first step was to understand it properly. When NeuBiom was incorporated in 2024, they made a deliberate decision to spend time with growers before building anything. They launched what they called a new-gen programme, identifying 23 progressive farmers from the region and spending hours having conversations with each of them. The conversations focused on how they worked, what they tracked, the challenges they faced, and the practices that had produced results over the years.

Babu’s father was the original inspiration for this direction and one of the 23 growers. At the same time, the founders were careful not to treat his approach as the template. His methods had been shaped by decades on a specific piece of land, and building around any single farmer’s practices would risk creating something too narrow to be useful to others.

"My father used a lot of data in farming, and if you can copy and paste that method to small-scale growers, the production and quality of the crop will surely go up", reflects Sooraj Babu.

The insights from these conversations shaped what came next. The user interface of what later became the Canopy application was co-designed with these growers. Early versions were shared, feedback was gathered, and the product was refined through repeated testing. Sooraj Krishna’s background in user-centred design shaped this process. For him, technology that does not account for how people actually work rarely survives in the field. NeuBiom’s approach was built alongside growers from the beginning.

"The grower part is very much invisible: when you think of coffee, you only get some brand names in your head, and we wanted to make sure that whatever technology we are working on, it should be people-centric", says Sooraj Krishna.

A walk through Canopy

The product that emerged from those months of listening became Canopy, a mobile application paired with a dashboard called Canopy Hub. It was designed for growers who may not think of themselves as technology users, and the interface reflects the care that went into building it with that audience in mind.

A grower begins by creating a profile with details such as location, coffee variety, intercrops, and average yield. They then map the boundaries of their plantation directly on the phone. Based on this, Canopy generates a plantation health report every 15 days using satellite data and weather inputs, which are processed through an AI model trained specifically on coffee crop data.

Where Canopy differs is in how it reads a plantation. Instead of treating a farm as a single unit, the platform divides it into micromanagement zones roughly 30 by 30 meters. Each grid is assessed individually, allowing the system to identify variations within the estate. It highlights areas that may be low on moisture, where canopy cover is strong or weak, and where vegetation health is declining.

A grower can stand anywhere in the plantation, open the app, and get insights specific to that location.

The app also provides current and forecast weather, along with daily crop cycle advisories based on the Coffee Board of India's recommended practices. The aim is to help growers understand what is happening on their farm and what actions to take.

One of the technical challenges comes from how coffee is grown in India, often under shade trees that block traditional satellite imagery. To address this, NeuBiom uses Synthetic Aperture Radar, or SAR data, which can capture conditions beneath the canopy. The models used to interpret this data were developed with input from agronomists at the Coffee Board of India and Kerala Agricultural University, and calibrated separately for Arabica and Robusta.

Canopy also guides soil sampling. Instead of relying on a single sample for a large area, the platform assesses variations across the plantation and suggests where and how many samples to take. This helps growers collect data that better reflects conditions across their land.

Building Beyond Canopy

Canopy is the entry point, but NeuBiom is building toward something larger. The founders describe it as an AI stack, or an operating system for coffee: a shared data infrastructure that different stakeholders across the value chain can use in ways that are meaningful to them.

For curing works, this creates a capability that has largely been missing. They can trace a quality profile back to a specific farm and assess whether that quality is consistent over time. NeuBiom is already working with a curing works in Wayanad, linking farm-level growing data with quality metrics recorded during processing. A curing works that wants a particular quality profile can identify which farms produce it, understand what practices lead to those outcomes, and build more reliable sourcing relationships.

For farmer-producer organisations, the platform offers visibility that many currently lack. Instead of functioning mainly as traders who aggregate and sell, FPOs using NeuBiom's infrastructure can monitor what is happening across member farms, identify which practices are producing results, and play a more active role in improving outcomes for growers.

For buyers, including specialty cafes and independent roasters, the platform provides traceability that the specialty market increasingly demands but rarely receives in documented form. A buyer looking for organic, shade-grown coffee from a specific region can identify farms that match these criteria and verify claims using recorded growing data rather than relying only on informal assurances.

The same infrastructure also applies at scale. One of NeuBiom's early clients, following a public launch event, was a large estate spanning between 3,000 and 4,000 acres. The estate relied on field staff with limited agronomy training and had a single rain gauge covering roughly 500 acres of varied terrain. Decisions about inputs and labour were being made without detailed information about conditions across the estate. NeuBiom's platform provided field-level visibility, allowing the estate to plan more effectively and allocate resources where they were actually needed.

As NeuBiom began working with different stakeholders, the need for credibility and access became increasingly important. In April 2025, the company joined the Atal Incubation Centre at CCRI, which helped accelerate this process. For a young company operating in a relationship-driven sector like the Indian coffee industry, the incubation opened doors that would otherwise have taken years to access.

Through the programme, the team connected with domain experts, FPO networks, and stakeholder communities. These early relationships helped expand adoption and build trust.

Together, Canopy and the broader infrastructure reflect the direction NeuBiom is moving toward: not just a tool for individual farms, but a shared system that connects information across the coffee value chain.

The Invisible People

India's coffee story is almost always told from the buyer's end. The brand, the origin note, and the estate name on the bag. The person who grew that coffee is rarely part of that story.

NeuBiom's core argument is that making the grower visible is not just the right thing to do but is commercially useful. Coffee backed by a traceable, documented growing record is worth more to specialty buyers, to processors, and to the increasingly discerning market for Indian coffee. The traceability NeuBiom is building is an attempt to connect each part of the value chain to the one before it, in a way that has not existed before.

The 23 growers who co-built Canopy are now using it at various levels to manage their plantations. The application is expanding into new FPO networks. The founders are two years in, incubated, working with clients across Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and still building.

Somewhere in Wayanad, there is a cupboard full of files. And Babu & Krishna are trying to take what is in those files and make it available to every grower who never had the time, or the resources, or the forty years, to build their own.