From Pilot Project to Market Expansion: CropMind

Scaling a precision agriculture platform into a sustainable business is a unique challenge. Based in Calgary and Fredericton, CropMind offers an AI-driven crop monitoring platform for vineyards, having proven its technology with growers across the Okanagan. As Cropmind seeks to ramp up its presence, this startup faced several key challenges ranging from go-to-market execution, data validation, and operational scaling.

In order to address this, Mahsa Yadegari, who is pursuing an MBA in Management Analytics at the University of New Brunswick, joined CropMind as a Mitacs intern, and developed an 18-page strategic roadmap grounded in market research and PESTLE analysis (how Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental external factors affect a business or an organization). Through this process, she identified Mexico’s winery sector as a top expansion target, outlined a partnership-led entry model for Australia, built a trade show database to evaluate events by cost and ROI, and unified CropMind’s marketing, sales, and partnership activities into a single operational plan.

The result: a defined path to a $900,000 bridge round target, and a newly signed agreement with a 375-acre partner now targeting dozens of partnerships.

“This experience allowed me to directly shape the growth strategy of an AI-driven agriculture company. It was incredibly valuable to see how strategy translates into real-world execution.”

Mahsa Yadegari, MBA Student, University of New Brunswick

CropMind co-founder and CEO Damilare Odumosu credited the collaboration with sharpening the company’s focus: “Mahsa brought strong structure and clarity to our growth strategy. Her work helped us prioritize the right markets and accelerate our path to revenue.”

About Mitacs

For over 25 years, Mitacs has helped grow the economy and develop the workforce of tomorrow, connecting industry with academia and global partners to solve real-world challenges. We support business-academic research collaboration through internships, co-funded with businesses, for undergraduate to graduate students and post-doctoral fellows.

As a national innovation connector, Mitacs takes a talent-first approach to strengthen innovation capacity and drive global competitiveness. We serve as an essential research-commercialization bridge, accelerating market entry and growth for new products and services.

This is a critical time for Canada to think big and take bold action. Mitacs is ready to help build a strong and resilient Canadian economy, powered by ideas, talent and innovation.

Mitacs is funded by the Government of Canada, the Government of Alberta, the Government of British Columbia, Research Manitoba, the Government of New Brunswick, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Government of Nova Scotia, the Government of Ontario, Innovation PEI, the Government of Quebec, the Government of Saskatchewan, and the Government of Yukon.