This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit journalism organization.
It’s 2016 and Simone Strey looks giddy. In the video, a clip from a series titled Innovators Under 35: Germany, the agritech entrepreneur awkwardly explains the challenge of jumping into the business side of the startup world. “We are all more from science,” she says in her German-accented English. But she and her team of coders, anthropologists, botanists, and plant pathologists had struck on something unique. Something potentially very big.
Their app, called Plantix, could near-instantaneously diagnose a crop pest or disease simply by looking at a photo of the plant. This was potentially