Interview for StartHub Wageningen
Hooray! The startup COWMAS recently received a Student Start-Up Loan. The Student Start-Up Loan is offered by StartLife and StartHub Wageningen to students with a promising business idea. The loan gives them the opportunity to accelerate their first business activities. To celebrate this achievement, we interviewed the founder of COWMAS, Askhat Zhanibekov!
Askhat’s roots lie in Kazakhstan, a country of vast steppes in the center of Eurasia. In 2019 he graduated from the Wageningen University & Research with a MSc degree in Management, Economics and Consumer Studies (MME) and a specialization in Business Economics.
“Before entering the WUR, I had experience working in corporate credit risk management. During my work, I enjoyed agri-food business projects the most. Therefore, I went to Wageningen, determined to extend my knowledge in managing economic and business risks in livestock farming and running sustainable farming operations,” Askhat says.
During his studies, he decided to embed the MSc Track Entrepreneurship in his program, which brought him in contact with StartHub. He participated in the Ideation and Realisation programs, which StartHub offers for students interested in entrepreneurship. Askhat even won a Startup Week competition in February 2019.
“Those events helped me a lot in shaping and structuring my initial business idea. At StartHub, I was happy to meet a lot of scientifically savvy and entrepreneurially minded people. Besides that, I found partners within the StartHub expert panel. It was a great time. I was able to combine my study and courses on entrepreneurship in agri-food, while learning a lot from a surrounding environment of a leading country in agri-food production. This productive ground helped me to make the first steps towards realization of my idea, into the startup we named COWMAS.”
The mission of COWMAS is to help cattle farmers to run efficient and sustainable farming by supporting their activities with advanced cattle management technology. “We’re an agritech software startup company with our own hardware product. We’re developing a platform connected to smart cattle ear tag sensors. Farmers benefit from this by being able to control their cattle that is grazing in remote pastures, monitor work of hired herders 24/7 and optimize many other livestock operations”, Askhat explains.
According to the FAO, more than 1.3 billion people worldwide are dependent on livestock to sustain their livelihood. 60% of the world's agricultural land is grazing land, supporting about 360 million cattle. A large proportion of this is farmed in developing countries, on rangelands, and often without access to contemporary knowledge and timely services.
“The further development of these countries will require the production of more products with fewer resources, especially land. The penetration of free-range cattle farming practices by information communication technologies, in my opinion, is an inevitable process that can foster efficient & sustainable production and support the lives of many people. I see huge business opportunities there. This is what drives me, to create a product that will bring efficiency, knowledge and services to farmers in very remote areas of the globe. And my home country Kazakhstan is a good starting point for that!“, he says.
Meanwhile, the startup has achieved some milestones. Recently, the first software prototype has been developed by the COWMAS team and demonstrator ear tag sensors have been assembled with the help of their partner, a hardware company from the StartHub community. “Since December, I am actively traveling to farms in Kazakhstan to validate our proposition, talk with them and define their needs. What we found is that there’s a growing interest among cattle farmers to explore the course of automatic identification of cattle. We are in the process of firmware coding for tags. We’re also improving our platform now, so farmers will be able to use the COWMAS app to keep track of animal records, before even getting smart cattle ear tags” Askhat says.
“With funds, our team can develop hardware (ear tag sensors), check the functionality of basic technology and test the value proposition with cattle farmers. The student start-up loan came just in time! I would like to thank StartHub and StartLife for their programs and supporting me, even after graduating from WUR. Special gratitude goes to Tim Daalderop, he’s a great startup incubator and business coach!”
To the final question of what the future plans of COWMAS are, Askhat answers: “We have lots of ambitious plans! In 2021 we want to complete prototyping and develop the commercial version of COWMAS’ tags and platform. We will do field tests in spring, by tagging free grazing cattle in Kazakhstan. We’ll continue working with farmers to get their validation and feedback, that will help us to improve our services. Another milestone will be raising seed funds to support our further growth. We’re excited to cooperate further with WUR for research on cattle behavior and remote monitoring of animals!”