This NABARD Venture capitalized AgTech startup provides end-to-end support to farmers across the country.
With more than 450 startups, India’s agtech market is valued at $24.1 billion and continues to grow at a rapid pace even during the pandemic. By 2020, agtech startups have seen over $300 million in investments, and the industry is predicted to grow at a CAGR of 32% from FY20 to FY25.
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Still, the sector has been slow to adopt technology and digitize unlike other industries such as finance and education.
Over the past few years, several agtech startups have emerged to revolutionize the sector through digitization and technology inclusion.
Expressing its commitment to create a digital agri-ecosystem to improve the lives of farmers in India, Unati is a fintech-led agricultural ecosystem partnering with Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) to empower farmers with technology-enabled business solutions to enhance their economic benefits. Strengths and market connections to improve their income.
The brand plans to support 3,000+ FPOs impacting 15 lakh farmers and plans to increase this number to 10,000+ FPOs, uplifting the lives of 1 million farmers by FY24.
Tech Panda He spoke to Amit Sinha, Co-Founder of Unati, about how they are supporting Indian farmers with technology.
Amit Sinha
Unnati’s technology know-how and business intelligence platform serves as a one-stop solution for retailers/small businesses, which streamlines business processes, provides better payment methods and helps supply chain management based on demand insights.
“Agri-input retailers/small traders play a central role in the agricultural value chain by helping farmers with the products and services they need to grow their crops and businesses. These include seeds, pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, nutrients, equipment and technologies,” he explains.
“Unati’s technology know-how and business intelligence platform will act as a one-stop solution for retailers/small businesses, which will streamline business processes, provide better payment methods and supply chain management with demand insights,” he added. .
What do they do?
Unati is digitizing the agricultural sector and is digitizing the agricultural sector by providing not only input procurement and output linkage for the farmers, but also loan services as well as agricultural and crop knowledge along with assessment and testing tools.
“Unati has developed an end-to-end technology backbone for all agribusiness stakeholders. It brings together everything from pre-harvest guidance to post-harvest services to work loans for farmers in a unified platform,” says Sinha.
Unnati has developed an end-to-end ‘technology backbone’ for all agribusiness stakeholders
The startup’s marketing platform includes agri-input, farm produce and credit line services. The AI platform provides technology-enabled insights into agronomy, while the knowledge platform serves as a knowledge bank for crops and products offered.
Motivation and origin
Sinha and his co-founder Ashok Prasad saw first-hand the issues faced by the rural community, availability of high-quality products, understanding of market requirements and market linkages, lack of involvement in operational technologies and how even local business owners were able to do so. They were facing problems in managing their business.
Sinha cites the informal and unorganized nature of agriculture as a key issue. Also, among the challenges faced by farmers are ‘purchase of inputs (right time, quantity and quality), availability of credit, linkage to output and access to farm knowledge’.
Other challenges are lack of digitization as well as unpredictable climate changes and lack of information and forecasting to address these.
Development history
Unati’s platform addresses the 360-degree challenges faced by farmers related to quality inputs, market access and increasing overall income.
“We are digitizing the entire ecosystem, providing high-quality inputs, output linkages, financial services, including credit line for farmers and partners, co-branded card for farmers and agro-advisory all on one platform,” Sinha proudly said.
The startup is on a mission to turn farmers into farm entrepreneurs and has taken initiatives like Digital Integrated Card, a brand partnership with Paytm, launched a unique digital integrated card to improve farmers’ income.
By digitizing the entire ecosystem, we are providing high-quality inputs, output linkages, financial services, including credit lines for farmers and partner organizations, and farmers’ co-branded card and agro-consultancy all in one platform.
In their partnership with Satyukt, the brand aims to provide innovative farming solutions using satellite technology. Unnati has also introduced post payment options for farmers.
The startup has grown to over 11000 uStores to help farmers. With over 11000 digitally enabled retail points, the uStore network is one of the largest in India. Crops like sugarcane, maize, paddy, wheat, cotton, mustard, and pulses reach more than 4 million farmers in the states of UP, Bihar, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, MP, and Maharashtra.
Unnati has demonstrated outstanding success in reaching and impacting the lives of over 300k farmers through its 20k+ uStore network. The company showed an impressive 16x growth in September and September last year.
Future plans
Unnati plans to continue expanding geographically by expanding into more districts in states like UP, Bihar, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Haryana and Punjab, augmenting its existing network of 17,000 uStores.
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“We plan to grow our intelligent platforms to address and solve problems faced by farmers in agriculture, and strive to provide valuable information to farmers to streamline their business and increase profitability. We are targeting to expand our UStore network to 1 lakh stores in the near future,” said Sinha.
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