Communications of the ACM
Princeton Undergrad's Agritech Startup Now Serves 50k Indian Farmers
Aditya Agarwalla (left) founded Kisan Network with his father, Sanjay Agarwalla (right), in 2015.
Credit: YourStory
Aditya Agarwalla started Kisan Network as a computer science undergraduate project at Princeton University. The digitally-enabled platform provides supply chain information and resources to farmers in India. When Agarwalla realized the problems he was trying to address were bigger than expected, he turn Kisan Network into a startup with his father in 2015.
Now Kisan Network has raised $3 million from investors including Y-Combinator, the Thiel Foundation, Venture Highway, FundersClub, Lynett Capital, Gokul Rajaram, and others. With a team of 70 people, Kisan Network has built a platform that touches over 50,000 farmers in over 6,000 villages across India.
The platform brings transparency to the supply chain and helps farmers "face hurdles in the crop selling process," Agarwalla says.
"Our supply chain has been built in a manner that makes it easy to replicate across regions very quickly," he says. "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."
From YourStory
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