From Small Rajasthan Village To IIT Delhi, Now Helping Farmers In A Unique Way

It is apparent that none of us can survive without our farmers. In spite of that, the farming community does not earn fair amount of profit, subsequently making their survival difficult. To eliminate this, a seven-year-old startup is bridging the gap between agriculture and businesses.

We all know that the reason behind decreasing profit digits in the farmer’s pay are the numerous mediators between them and the end customers. The farmers look out for the mediators, as they are unable to undergo the logistic costs by themselves. Nonetheless, everything in this world has a solution. To solve this issue, a startup was introduced to work primarily for the benefit of farmers. Anu Meena comes from Manoli, a small village in Rajasthan. She saw her grandfather, who was a farmer, facing problem in selling his product. Many farmers faced the same difficulty.

Anu decided to solve this problem. After graduating from IIT Delhi, she started a company named Agrowave, which is an agritech venture. Agrowave aims at providing the best price to the farmers with incorporation of technology. They work to organize the existing supply chain with the help of research, analytics, and technology.

Talking about her startup, Anu says, “Agriculture is highly unorganized and people are working in this sector to streamline it. However, it will take time to incorporate technology.”

To start the venture, Anu had to borrow money from a few friends and seniors but soon, she was able to raise seed funding from Daffodil Software Ltd., founded by Yogesh Agarwal. This boosted the business and they started focusing on the actual problem — how to provide better price to the farmers. They started delivering fresh fruits and vegetables to retail shops, hostels, canteens, caterers, etc.

Anu has now teamed up with Payal Jawalkar and Arun Yadav, who help her with Analytics and Operations of Agrowave. With a bunch of other young and enthusiastic people, Agrowave’s organizational structure mainly focuses on cooperation amongst the team. “The startup is not only about individual role but it’s all about taking accountability of the work which is required,” says Anu.

Since there is no third party involved for logistics and cost management, they have to make their own delivery cost efficient. In addition, mapping the quality as per customer’s need is a difficult task as it takes a lot of time to do it individually.

In an interview with KenFolios, Anu talks about the challenges she faced. “It’s not easy to reach out to each farmer. We have tried and on boarded around 50 farmers but doing it on a large scale is not an easy task. To eliminate this, we are looking to tie up with government so that we can associate with farmers in large scale.”

With an ongoing 50k+ transaction per day, Agrowave has 30 customers and have on boarded 50 farmers. They also have targeted revenue of Rs 1.2 Crore in six months. The team wishes to expand the business in different cities for better linkage and benefitting as many farmers they can.

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