SmartCane BV — Satellite Monitoring for Sugarcane

In May 2024 I co-founded SmartCane BV with a straightforward question: if you can map smallholder irrigation across Mozambique from a satellite, why can’t you reliably monitor a large sugarcane estate?

Turns out you can, but sugarcane is trickier than it looks. Different varieties, different planting dates, ratoon cycles, cloud cover in tropical regions — simple vegetation indices don’t cut it. You need time series, and you need to understand how sugarcane actually grows before the numbers mean anything.

SmartCane builds monitoring tools for the industry: crop health tracking across estates, growth stage and harvest timing support, and field-level reporting that doesn’t require the client to know what a GeoTIFF is. The pipeline runs on Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope imagery, processed in the cloud.

My role covers the technical side — data pipelines, classification models, product development — and the client conversations. It’s the kind of job where you spend a morning debugging a cloud masking issue and an afternoon explaining what NDVI means to an estate manager. Both matter equally.