Agri startup uses franchise route to smart fields
Farmers in India face numerous problems in today’s world. One of the major issues is low farm yield and productivity which results in losses and poverty. A bunch of engineering grads led by IITD alumni, Shashank Kumar (B.Tech. in Textile Technology, Batch of 2008) decided to tackle this problem head-on.
He and a few others were studying farms around Vaishali and realized that the unit economics of growing wheat in that region made it unprofitable. They realized rajma would be a better choice instead due to low irrigation and labor costs and shorter crop cycles. However, farmers were initially reluctant to change. After a lot of persuasion, one farmer set aside a third of his land for rajma. Soon, 14 other farmers joined in.
That was the first bud of what grew into the startup DeHaat (registered as AgRevolution). At the outset, its model was to provide advisory services to farmers and market linkages. It tied up with food processing companies for procurement, assuring them quality and availability of produce. It tied up with input companies to provide seeds, fertilizers and pesticides to farmers, assuring them reliable products at fair prices. Lately, it has also been bringing financing and insurance companies to its platform.
Farmers access advisory services on the DeHaat mobile app and call centre as well as at the centre. A DeHaat centre serves 300-400 farmers. There are now 700 such franchises, working with 244,000 farmers in Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh.
The franchise model differentiates DeHaat from a B2B agri-marketplace like Bengaluru-based Ninjacart, which works with larger collection centres. DeHaat is more involved on the farmer side, and mostly ties up with institutional buyers for procurement. “From the first day, our gut feel was to be closer to farmers and create an ecosystem around them. That’s how we’ve evolved,” says Kumar.
DeHaat has also been receiving good funding. Sequoia Capital India led its $12 million series A round in April. This makes DeHaat the seventh-highest funded agritech startup in India and the only one in the top 20 that’s in eastern India, according to data by Tracxn.
As the startup has grown, so has its backend analytics to help farmers choose what to grow and how to do it for better returns. Soil testing, weather tracking, input management and pricing insights all come into it. Today, they are working with nearly a quarter of a million farmers. But Bihar itself has a million farmers and India has over 100 million. So there is still a huge scope of growth and expansion which DeHaat plans to achieve in the coming years.
