Meet Farooq Anjum | Startup Entrepreneur

We had the good fortune of connecting with Farooq Anjum and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Farooq, how does your business help the community or world?
Food is a basic necessity of human life. In addition the world population is increasing while the lands to grow food are not. Hence we need to do whatever we can to increase the quantity of food available for human consumption whether it be increasing the quantity of food produced per acre or decreasing the amount of food wasted. Our business is focused on helping growers increase crop yields and reduce the resource usage. And we have growers growing various crops such as corn, cotton, wheat, soyabean, almonds, grapes etc. Over the last several years we have made a difference in the life of several farmers. These farmers tell us about how our product has helped them make more money by increasing the crop yields and that makes me very happy. Of course, in addition to this we have provided employment to several people in the company with several jobs being located in rural communities.

What should our readers know about your business?
GroGuru helps farmers make strategic irrigation decisions. This ensures that the crop gets the right water at the right time which results in increased crop yields and optimal use of resources such as water and fertilizer. We have a game changing technology that allows us to get data for commodity crop farmers in situations where it was not possible earlier. This allows lot more farmers to make scientific decisions related to irrigation management. This technology sets our company apart from others since no one else has been able to do it before us in a robust and scalable fashion. And combining the data received with our machine learning algorithms results in very precise recommendations to the farmers that we are very excited about. It has been several ups and downs in order to get to where we are today business wise. and it has been a hard journey – but very worth it especially when you consider the various ups such as when a farmer tells you how big a difference this product has made for them. Or when I see tens of people getting gainful employment because of GroGuru. And the biggest weapon to overcome these challenges is persistence. And to remember that an individual is not a superman. Got to reach out to others for help while not giving up on the objectives and the vision.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Getting time to visit the spots in the city while being a startup entrepreneur is hard. However I would take them to the beaches of Coronado island, La Jolla Cove and Mission Bay.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
There have been several people who have helped me tremendously on the startup journey and in bringing GroGuru to where it is now. However, one who has had the biggest impact on GroGuru is Evonexus – a technology startup incubator in town and its CEO Rory Moore. And there are several others who have helped along the way such as the various investors in GroGuru who believed in the potential of GroGuru and the early adopters who took a chance buying our product even though there was a risk associated with doing this. And of course the employees of GroGuru who joined us to help us attain our objectives even though they had the opportunity to join bigger companies.

Website: https://www.groguru.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/18741580/admin/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mygroguru
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mygroguru/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKGRB4mjih-XpVSTLFCyf9g