Siddharth Dialani: The AgriTech Gamechanger Every month, more than 10 lakh farmers use the BharatAgri App or website for farm management advice with personalized agronomic intelligence, from land preparation to harvesting. In the next 18 months, the start-up wants to focus on leveraging Generative AI across its platform

Did you know why most Indian farmers face the problem of low production in Indian farms? This is because they do not implement scientific techniques on the farm. Most of the time, they also end up buying wrong or expensive inputs. This results in lower productivity and leads to losses as farmers are unable to utilize their farm's potential fully.

BharatAgri is bridging this gap by providing personalized scientific techniques for farm management, starting from land preparation to harvesting, details about nutrition management, pest & disease management, water management, and inter-crop operations. The company combines weather-based parameters and agronomical data to provide more accurate advice to farmers.

It does it through its YouTube Channel, ecommerce platform and App. "We have around 145K subscribers, and the farming community widely follows our videos on advanced farming tips. We also have Gen AI-driven customer support, starting with chat applications. Today, 45% of our queries are resolved by the chatbot. This not only increases our efficiency but also makes our customer support much more accurate and prompt. Users can then place orders to purchase farm inputs from the chat window," says Siddharth Dialani, Founder & CEO, BharatAgri.

Utilizing GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) models, BharatAgri's AI-driven bot achieves higher accuracy in responding to queries from farmers while minimizing error rates compared to human counterparts.

There are two ways in which its solution works. First, farmers input information about their farm, such as crop, area, irrigation, etc. The system predicts the pest/disease/growth-related problems that the crop may face in the coming days. This information can help the farmers in preventing the problem as well as improving the growth of the crop. Farmers can then place orders for the suggested solution.

Second, farmers can search for a particular product and place an order directly from their mobile. This enables farmers to get access to products often superior (new generation) and not available at their local shop, delivered directly to their doorstep quickly (usually 3-4 days), and be confident of the authenticity of the products (which is a big problem with purchasing from local shops).

BharatAgri's e-commerce platform offers 10,000-plus agricultural products such as fertilizers, seeds, pesticides, insecticides, and farming equipment, among others, and is delivered pan-India across 20,000-plus pin codes. Every month, more than 10 lakh farmers use the BharatAgri App or website for farm management advice with personalized agronomic intelligence, from land preparation to harvesting.

So how does Dialani ensure that the organization stays ahead and keeps relevant in a constantly changing marketplace? "The key is to hire the right people and give them the freedom to think and implement new ideas. As a leader, it is essential to trust them and give them adequate tools and resources. The culture plays an important role here. Our team is eager to provide the best solution to our customers. We regularly invite tech and product leaders from the ecosystem for cross-learning. We also keep a close eye on the competition from the customers' perspective, frequently asking: Is someone else serving our customers better?"

Talking about challenges, Dialani says that "We believe that we will have a moat once we have the trust of the farmers. Here, we are talking about users who have never bought anything online. When they buy from BharatAgri, it's their first online purchase ever. And that, too, is for something that can impact their livelihood."

What does the road towards profitability look like? The company earns its revenue from every product that is sold on the platform. "We aim to maintain strong unit economics and continue to grow the market share".

For the next 18 months, the start-up wants to focus on leveraging Generative AI across its platform, grow its product portfolio, introduce new categories like tools, equipment, gardening products, etc and add 10,000+ SKUs on the platform. It is also looking at launching more languages like Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil, etc, and improve delivery, open fulfillment centers in different states to reduce the delivery TAT in most of the pin codes.

Factsheet:

Year of inception: 2018

No. of employees: 40

Revenue for FY 2022-23:INR 4Cr

External funding received so far: $12M (Series A)