SANJEEV BIKHCHANDANI has inspired a generation of founders. One of them is IIT Delhi alumnus Shashank Kumar. Around 2010, Kumar, who was in consulting then but mulling his own venture, attended an event where the Info Edge co-founder was a speaker. Kumar recalls that someone asked how one would know that one had the right idea for a startup. Bikhchandani said a founder had to ask himself if he was ready to work on the idea for five years even if there was no funding; if the answer was yes, then the idea was right. What’s more, the founder wouldn’t have to wait five years to get funding.

Bikhchandani’s checklist validated the idea that was still taking shape in Kumar’s mind. By then he had decided to do something in the agri space. Growing up in Bihar’s Chapra district around farmers had made him aware of the issues they faced; and in his consulting job, he met food companies, who are at the other end of the supply chain. While farmers had to deal with low profitability and productivity, food companies had issues related to lack of efficiency and transparency. This is what Kumar strived to solve. “Instead of starting from the demand side (food companies) we decided to start from the supply side (farmers),” Kumar says. Chucking up his well-paying job, he moved back to Bihar, where he gathered around a band of friends and acquaintances — Amrendra Singh, Adarsh Srivastav, Shyam Sundar Singh, and Abhishek Dokania — and co-founded Green Agrevolution (DeHaat) in 2012.

Today, DeHaat provides the full stack of solutions and services to the farming community. Kumar, also the DeHaat CEO, tells Fortune India that the company’s tagline, ‘From seed to market’, describes how it serves the community — from selling inputs, to providing advisory, to buying their output, besides providing financing and insurance. And with revenue of ₹2,720 crore in FY24, according to Tracxn data, it leads Fortune India’s list of startups in the agritech space.

A few years after Kumar and his co-founders set up DeHaat, fellow IIT Delhi alumnus Varun Khurana, a serial entrepreneur, decided to get into the agritech space as he wanted to do something where his venture could have a huge impact. “When we started out in 2016, the agritech sector was in a nascent stage… and it made sense to enter a space that wasn’t very crowded,” Khurana, the founder and CEO of agritech startup Crofarm, tells Fortune India. The startup, which is now present in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai, began life as a B2B fruits and delivery business in Delhi-NCR and has now grown to operate farm-to-fork brand Otipy, dairy brand Farm Tale, and staples brand One Farm. It helped that Khurana had experience of building the supply chain in his earlier avatar as CTO of the erstwhile Grofers.

Stratup Special — Agritech

How agritech is revolutionising supply chains and retail in agriculture