Mumbai-based White Shadow Technology Pvt. Ltd, that operates online B2B marketplace Bharat Bazaar, has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from a clutch of prominent investors including BeeNext, a Singapore-based early-stage technology fund, TV Mohandas Pai (Chairman, Manipal Global Education Services and Aarin Capital), Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon (FreeCharge co-founders).

Other investors who participated include Rohit Bansal and Kunal Bahl (Snapdeal co-founders), Anupam Mittal (co-founder, Shaadi.com), Amit Gupta (co-founder of Inmobi), Tracxn Labs and others.

“There has never been a better time to digitise agriculture in India. Supply channel bottlenecks and lack of a proper marketing channel are serious problems for a farmer who is already burdened with a host of troubles. These are the issues we plan to tackle at the regional, state and national levels,” said Saurabh Jain, co-founder at Bharat Bazaar, in a press statement​

“Agriculture and allied activities are the single largest source of employment in India and this sector has an immense potential for disruption. We look at our work as empowering some of the poorest farmers and bringing about an irreversible tech driven change in their lives,” said co-founder Kedar Gokhale.

Founded in July 2015, Bharat Bazaar (earlier called Truce-True Price), is a mobile app that helps facilitate increased choice, trust and transparency between buyers and sellers, and bring in transactional ease into the fruits and vegetables wholesale supply chain. The startup partners with farmers, local aggregators, wholesalers, bulk buyers, food processing industries and exporters and has a buyer base in Maharashtra, Delhi, MP, Karnataka, Gujarat, and Rajasthan.

So today, with the help of Bharat Bazaar, a farmer Raosaheb of Nashik region is able to sell his Broccoli to a wholesaler in Ahmedabad at 50 per cent better price than what he would conventionally get from Mumbai APMC market.

The funding will be used to increase team size and presence across multiple Indian cities. Bharat Bazaar aims to target 50,000 active users by December 2016.

"The grocery supply chain, in its current design, has a lot of middlemen and this presents a significant untapped opportunity to introduce efficiency across the whole value chain. By leveraging technology, Bharat Bazaar has streamlined end-to-end procurement processes. The B2B grocery delivery market for fruits & vegetables has a very large addressable market, with customers ranging from wholesalers, kirana stores, hyper markets, hotels, and B2C delivery startups," said Neha Singh, co-founder at Tracxn.

The app currently allows access and choice along with offline logistics, quality and payment facilitation. For the farmer, the marketplace app opens up a multitude of buyers, transcending locations and languages, making the entire process a hassle free experience.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW