Bharat Agri, an agricultural technology platform that helps farmers with a unique algorithm and provides a crop calendar for the entire year through a mobile app, plans to expand to Gujarat, Karnataka and Telangana region. The company will first expand its logistics network in North India to ensure timely input from farmers, said Sai Gole, co-founder and CEO of the startup. Crop Input Companies BharatAgri, which started as a consultancy providing farmers with an annual calendar detailing the steps required, has now entered the crop input business with around 200 companies involved. Apart from regional players, the companies include multinationals such as Bayer, FMC, UPL, and Dhanuka Agritech “We have all the logistics. So we are expanding in North India to ensure that whatever the farmers order, they get it in the shortest possible time. So for Maharashtra, we can deliver within 48 hours, but for other states, it still takes us 3-5 days”, said the founder of the Pune-based company. Bharat Agri, incorporated as Leancrop Technology Solutions Pvt Ltd, currently operates in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan, besides having a small presence in Karnataka and Telangana. In October this year, BharatAgri raised ₹35 crore ($4.3 million) in Series A funding led by Arkam Ventures, an early-stage venture fund dedicated to startups in central India.
Growing Farmers’ Crops
Gole, whose family has traditionally been in the agricultural sector, told Business Line in an online chat that he and his co-founder, the company’s CEO Siddharth Dialani, launched the startup in 2017 with the aim of increasing the productivity of farmers.”The original goal was to bridge the productivity gap, That’s why we started with the advisory part. The first three years we spent just building the technology to make sure we could provide affordable advice to farmers, Gole and Dialani lived on a farm 100 km away in Pune and did three seasons of all farm operations to understand the whole business. “We didn’t want to build something where we were dependent on someone else’s expertise”. Bharat Agri is an advisory platform where farmers can provide input on more than 20 farm parameters. In turn, the company helps them with advice tailored to their position. Services are available in Hindi, Marathi, and English.
