Aline Oliveira Pezente, a 39-year-old entrepreneur from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, was working at the agriculture company Louis Dreyfus Commodities when she noticed a problem in how the farming industry operates in Brazil.
Producers need huge amounts of credit up-front to buy inputs like seed and fertilizer, she says. But lenders are wary given how difficult it is to size up the myriad risks, from natural—droughts, floods, crop disease, erosion—to financial—bankruptcy, price crashes and more.
In 2018, Aline and her husband Fabricio launched a startup called Traive that collects massive amounts of agriculture-related data, then analyzes it with AI, breaking down the capital risk for lenders and giving farmers easier access to credit.
"Lenders used to each use their own (risk analysis) model. Imagine like a giant Excel file," Aline told AFP. "But it's very hard for humans, even those who are super knowledgeable of statistics and mathematics, to create equations that capture the nuances of all the variables.
"They were taking three months to do something that we can do in five minutes with way better accuracy," said Aline, who has a master's degree specializing in AI and data analysis from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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