In 2018, a biotechnologist and microbiologist walked away from her job. Her first work in the field was tissue-culturing Kappa Pazham — the deep red banana variant native to the hills around Thiruvananthapuram, known locally as Chenkadali. It was slow, hands-in-the-soil work, and it put her in daily conversation with the people who actually grow food: farmers.
Farmers told her the same story again and again. They'd send a soil sample for testing, and results would come back weeks — sometimes months — later. But a tissue-cultured banana plant is ready for harvest in about four months. By the time the report arrived, the season it was meant to guide was already over. So farmers guessed instead, and over-applied fertiliser "to be safe" — quietly pushing the soil's nutrients out of balance and making it inhospitable to the microbial life underneath every healthy field.
She kept returning to one comparison: a hospital has a thermometer, a vet clinic has diagnostics on hand. Agriculture had nothing like that. What existed for soil nutrient sensing was mostly reagent-based — accurate in a lab, impractical in a field. What was missing was something closer to a thermometer: no reagents, no lab queue, an instant and reliable reading, in the farmer's own hands.
On July 20, 2018, Biota Precision Agriculture Pvt Ltd was incorporated, with early support through Startup India. The goal was always direct sensing — measuring soil nutrients the way they actually behave, not estimating from proxies or averaged history. But getting that to work reliably in real soil conditions took far longer than expected. Soil is not a controlled medium: its chemistry shifts with every input, every rain, every season. Getting a sensor to respond correctly and selectively to each nutrient — tracking them as they move in both directions under real field conditions — came right to the edge of giving up before it finally held. That was the breakthrough.
A working principle isn't a market-ready product. What followed was years of unglamorous work — collecting soil samples from across Kerala and parts of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, testing them against the sensor, and running the same samples through conventional labs in parallel. That got the technology to roughly 75% accuracy, and the team kept refining from there. Around 2023–24, the product was included in a research study by Kerala Agricultural University (KAU) alongside other sensing technologies — not designed as Biota's moment, but NutRE™ returned an accuracy of 88.97%, and that result held up under repeated, consistent evaluation.
The patent for NutRE™ was filed in 2025, and the product reached the market on December 14, 2025, launched at KSUM Huddle Global 2025. We're still a small team. We're still led by women, the way we started. And we still measure our work the same way we did on day one: not by how impressive a demo looks, but by whether it actually helps someone standing in a field make a better decision today.
Kappa Pazham (also known as Chenkadali) is a red-skinned banana variety traditional to Kerala. Reference: TNAU Agritech Portal — Banana Season & Varieties