Agritech-startup - A silver lining in Covid

Mihir Mohanta, General Manager Supply Chain, Mother Dairy

Mihir Mohanta, General Manager Supply Chain, Mother Dairy

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Startups quest to create an identity for themselves through a repeatable and scalable business model. These startups co-exist and compete with the traditional business ecosystem. India has more than 1000 startups in the Agritech domain. There are also more than 300 incubation centers to support such startups.

During the pandemic, the traditional ecosystem was struggling as most agriculture mandis remained shut. However, the startups came up with innovative solutions. Pandemic helped catalyze a shift across the agricultural economy, away from traditional, informal, and analog markets towards a more innovative, formal, and digital one. While the customers were confined to homes, startups could take orders through apps, aggregate the demand and arrange supplies to their doorstep. Similarly, they could pay directly to the farmers' account through direct bank transfer (DBT). There were many digital technologies that were silently executed during the Covid pandemic to make the physical flow smooth. The Covid environment did provide a space for the Agri-tech start-ups to grow their farmers' & consumers' bases multi-fold.

The Startups can be grouped into the following major categories:

1. Marketplace:

It is a physical or virtual space where the activity of buying and selling products takes place. The players like NeML, e-NAM, or Market Mirch only provide a platform for the transaction and they are not the transacting parties. They take some user fees as service charges for use of their platform. But there are Startups that operate like a marketplace and are also the transacting parties. Some of them are listed below:

Ninjacart - Started operation in 2015, Ninjacart is a Bangalore-based agriculture supply chain company. It is in the B2B space in the agri-output (fruits & vegetables) business. It links farmers with retailers and institutions such as hotels.

WayCool - Started operation in 2015, WayCool is also in B2B space but operates in both Output (fruits & vegetables) Input (fertilizer, nutrients & plant protection) businesses. It offers an agritech platform that uses technology to control the end-to-end supply chain right from farm inputs to last-mile distribution. It helps the farmers to sell their produce through multiple distribution channels.

AgroStar - Started in 2013, AgroStar offers an online marketplace for farmers to buy agricultural inputs. This agritech startup also helps farmers by providing real-time advice from experts on how to manage their crops and boost their yield.

Otipy - Started as Crofarm in 2016, they shifted their business from B2B to B2C. They aggregate their fruits & vegetable demand through their Otipy app from the consumers and businesses. Based on the aggregated demand, supplies are confirmed and then those crops are harvested from the farm and delivered within 12 hours.

2. Farm Management Services:

These startups typically, provide management tools to ease up farm operations through

planning, resource deployment & monitoring. They strive to maximize the yield or return by optimizing resource deployment. Managing and maintaining traceability is another important feature of them.

Key startups operating under these categories are:

DeHaat (2012) - It offers agricultural services such as access to agricultural inputs that include seeds and fertilizers at affordable prices, personalized assistance, soil testing, weather reports, micro-finance, and insurance.

Stellapps (2011) - Stellapps helps dairy farmers and cooperatives to maximize their profits by digitizing and optimizing Milk Procurement & cold chain Management through its IoT-based SmartMoo platform.

CropIn Technology (2010) - Its platform is designed to offer real-time weather updates, manage farm activities, and predict crop yields to minimize risk and improve yield.

3. Hardware for assaying & quality monitoring:

These startups are developing miniature, handy & easy to use lab equipment using the latest technologies such as spectral images, computer vision & AI. They can detect maturity levels and other parameters of fruits even without rupturing the fruits.

Intello Labs (2016) - Intello Labs offers digital quality testing hardware such as Intello Track, Intello Sort, Intello Pack, and Intello Deep, which uses technologies that include computer vision & deep learning for assaying the quality of the fruits & vegetables. Intello Labs’ mobile app, Intello Track, is also helping in monitoring food quality.

Agricx (2016) - is an AI-enabled SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) stack for the companies in the business of producing, trading, storing, transporting, processing, or financing agricultural produce.

4. Farm machinery aggregation services:

Rental services for farm machinery have gained ground, in India in the past few years. These services are more like taxi aggregation services like Ola or Uber. They are converting capital investment assets to pay-per-use models.

EM3 AgriServices (2013) – This startup helps small farmers who cannot afford to buy expensive farming technology to rent specialization machines to boost productivity at cheaper costs. Tractor & Threshers rental services are most commonly used.

Gold Farm (2012) - It offers a mobile app-based farm-equipment booking system. It is leveraging IoT for demand generation and tracking. It has developed an algorithm that tracks the location of the equipment in operation as well as the amount of fuel consumed. They also provide solar water pumps for farmers working in power deficit regions in India.

The question as usual is how these startups are doing. Is there a future in Agri-startups investment? Some reports indicate a bright prospect of Agritech startups. The study report by Accel & Omnivore indicates most Agri-startups have grown by 0.5X to 3X plus during the pandemic.

According to a September 2020 report by EY, India’s Agritech market has the potential to reach $24 billion by 2025, although only 1% is addressed today.

The largest opportunity (USD 12 billion) is in supply chain technology and output market linkages, with another USD 4.1 billion of potential in financial services for farmers, USD 3.4 billion in precision agriculture and farm management, USD 3.0 billion in quality management and traceability and USD 1.4 billion in optimizing market linkages for farm inputs.

A Bain & Co report in Jun 2021, states that Agritech and Agri-ecosystem sectors have received significant interest from the investor community, making India the third-largest country in terms of Agritech funding and the number of Agritech startups. The report estimates that the investment in Agritech startup would be USD 30-35 billion by 2025.

The number of Agri-tech start-ups are grown to more than 1000 from just 250 in 2018. Similarly, the investment which was USD 91 million in 2017 has risen to USD 329 million by 2020. It is growing at a CAGR of 53 percent. Agri-tech startups have learned to cope up with the challenges of Covid, while most traditional businesses were struggling, they had their growth stories shining. Investors’ confidence is renewed for a brighter future. (Opinions expressed here are personal views of the author and not connected to any of the past or present organizations where he worked.)