Our Next Chapter: $3m to grow our PAN India Farmer Network
by Aditya Agarwalla & Sanjay Agarwalla, Co-founders, Kisan Network
Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we have raised $3m led by Atsushi Taira at Mistletoe, with participation from Y Combinator, the Thiel Foundation, Venture Highway, FundersClub, Lynett Capital, Gokul Rajaram and other angels.
This is a big milestone for our team. What started as a dinner table conversation during a school break, and subsequently became my (Aditya’s) Computer Science undergraduate thesis project at a Princeton University dorm a few years ago, has developed into a thriving organization of 70 (and growing!), serving more than 55,000 farmers across thousands of villages in India.
We have come a long way, but still have an even longer way to go!
Why are we doing this?
Farmers all over India (a majority of whom are marginal) face several hurdles at the time of crop sale.
(i) Opaque pricing (ii) Limited knowledge about best markets to sell produce to (iii) Delayed cash and installment based payments after sale (iv) Poor local logistical support
These hurdles are well documented. They have been present for generations with little to no improvement at a large enough scale to impact farmers directly. Why is that?
We believe that these hurdles are a manifestation of a much deeper rooted issue in Indian agriculture.
The issue is that of distrust that permeates throughout the ecosystem.
Through our team’s grassroots level interactions with farmers and other rural stakeholders across different geographies and demographics, we have learnt that this feeling is entirely justified — farmers feel they are mere spectators, with limited decision making power and constantly in fear of being exploited by others in the trade while engaging in any form of financial transaction.
This feeling of distrust is especially acute when we talk about their primary mode of income i.e. the sale of their produce.
The rest of us, living in urban centres and in more developed parts of the world, might find it hard to relate to this, with both information and ability to act on the information, available at our fingertips owing to the digital revolution that has swept all of us since the advent of the internet. But if we think that the same is true for farmers, we couldn’t be further from reality.
What does Kisan Network do to address this distrust?
To tackle the distrust, it is essential for Kisan Network to address the 2 primary reasons behind it:
- Access to information — market prices, detailed crop quality reports, transportation rates and every other minute detail that makes a crop sale transaction possible. All of these are readily made available to a Kisan Network farmer.
- Resources to act on the information — via our PAN India farmer to business supply chain that brings together all stakeholders (such as buyers, transporters and packaging partners) on one platform. Tech enabled throughout with 0% use of paper and digital on-time payments directly to farmers.
With these two at his disposal, a farmer is finally able to trust the system and is well equipped to face the hurdles in the crop selling process.
In addition to these benefits, Kisan Network makes the farmer the centre of the ecosystem by improving his crop selling experience. In other words,
We treat the farmer like an entrepreneur.
The value of this approach, while intangible, cannot be overstated.
To make all of this a reality, the entire team has worked extensively over the past few years establishing the building blocks of a farmer first supply chain with 3 important pillars:
1. Digitally Enabled Supply Chain Transparency
The Indian agricultural market is a black box of sorts with little to no data being collected and made available publicly. Without collecting and then sharing data, providing transparency is merely lip service. To address this, our supply chain has 100% granular data acquisition at each and every step (like crop quality, quality based pricing, payments), which is then made available to all stakeholders involved in a transaction, including the farmer.
2. Data and Process Driven Standardization
In order to address the distrust problem faced by farmers all over the country and not just in one region, our supply chain has been built in a manner that makes it easy to replicate across regions very quickly. With 0% use of paper, data driven decision making and standardized asset light field processes, achieving multi region coverage has become a reality as we rapidly expand across the country.
In particular, our use of Computer Vision to remotely assess physical characteristics of crops has gone a long way in helping us make quick and accurate decisions about produce quality and the prices it will fetch.
3. End to End Integration
This crucial pillar is what translates information about markets / prices / payments to actions that actually help the farmer realize the benefit of having such information at his disposal. At Kisan Network, all steps from farm to business are taken care of, irrespective of the distance between the farmer and the market. This can range from a few hundred kilometres to thousands of kilometres crisss-crossing the country, and in all of this, the farmer does not end up having to leave his farm for a transaction to take place.
The Next Chapter
55,000+ Farmers On-Boarded
100% Procurement Directly from Farmers
6,000+ Villages Covered
275k+ KM Travelled by Produce over 65 unique PAN India routes
The entire team at Kisan Network has worked tirelessly over the past few years to get to this point in our journey and has immense pride in the impact we have been able to generate so far.
But what’s coming next is even more exciting.
With the building blocks of our supply chain in place, we believe that we are the cusp of becoming an even larger PAN India player in the market. This investment will aid the rapid expansion into new regions and crops across the country, bringing lakhs of more marginal farmers into the fold and helping them ship hundreds of more trucks directly from their farms to businesses.
A portion of the round will also go towards introducing new farmer centric products and services to existing farmers on our network, and we are pumped to share more on that in due course!
Taira-san from Mistletoe is an ardent supporter of what Kisan Network is doing, and here’s what he has to say -
“We see immense value in Kisan Network’s focus in providing market linkages directly to farmers, and their progress so far in building out each aspect of their tech enabled supply chain is highly promising. We are excited to partner with them in scaling rapidly to every nook and corner of the country, and empowering farmers to become entrepreneurs by providing various kinds of services through Kisan Network.”
— Atsushi Taira (Managing Director, Mistletoe Singapore)
While raising money is sometimes mistaken for success, we realize the fallacy in doing so. Farmers could not care less about how much we have raised, who we have raised from, how swanky our HQ is or how much we are valued at. Working with them on a daily basis keeps us and the entire team grounded, and rightly so.
So we’ll celebrate this milestone for a day but after that, it’s back to work!
With gratitude to our farmers, team and investors,
Aditya & Sanjay
Co-founders, Kisan Network
