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BigHaat, a Bengaluru-based digital agri platform that offers end-to-end farming solutions, is aiming to onboard over a million farmers from Tamil Nadu in the next one year.
“Tamil Nadu has been one of the potential states for us. The farmers in the State are extremely progressive and adaptive to new technologies. Tamil Nadu has about 80-lakh farmers and our aim is to bring at least one million farmers into our digital ecosystem in the next 12 months,” Sateesh Nukala, Co-Founder, and CEO, BigHaat, told BusinessLine.
“Not just digital, we are trying to build an omnichannel presence in Tamil Nadu by establishing field presence in many districts of the State. We are already seeing great traction from districts like Dharmapuri, Dindigul, Kanchipuram, Madurai and Erode in areas of horticulture, plantations and field crops,” he added.
Personalised advisory
BigHaat recently launched its mobile application in Tamil to enable the farming community in the State to avail of products and services on the platform, besides getting personalised advisory in the local language. The app was hitherto available in Telugu, Hindi and English.
Launched in 2015 by Sateesh Nukala and Sachin Nandwana, who themselves are from farming families, BigHaat is a direct-to-farmer digital platform that transforms the entire agriculture value chain from pre-harvest to post-harvest by leveraging data, technology, and crop science.
The platform initially focused on solving pre-harvest challenges of the farming community in Karnataka. The agri-tech platform started with offering seeds across a wide variety of horticulture and field crops and later extended its portfolio to include various other products including insecticides, pesticides, fertilisers, crop nutrients, etc.
“In almost three years, we could build India’s largest portfolio of seeds across horticulture and field crops. Once we created the supply chain for seeds, we started offering various other categories based on the expertise and experience gained through our interaction with farmers,” Nukala said.
BigHaat has now become a full stack platform by providing end-to-end farming solutions including machinery and farm equipment rental, post harvest accessories, market linkages, loans and insurance to rural customers and farmers in partnership with banks and financial institutions.
“Today, we have 300 plus brands on the platform with over 7,000 SKUs across all categories of products and services,” Nukala said.
Jump in user base
According to Nukala, over seven million farmers have availed of BigHaat’s services since its inception and over a million active users / farmers are engaging with the platform every month.
“We have seen a 10-15 fold increase in user base in the last 24 months. We are at a breakout moment and in the next 5-10 years, we will continue to see this kind of a growth given the rapid internet penetration and growing smartphone usage in rural India,” Nukala said.
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