The Delhi-based agri-tech commodity B2B trading platform Poshn is looking to expand its operations to other parts of the country and trading by entering the cash crops segment, its top official said.

“We are currently operating in the northern belt and in commodities such as sugar, oil, flour, and rice. We are looking to expand to other parts and enter the cash crop segment,” said Shashank Singh, the company’s co-founder.

Bhuvnesh Gupta (left) and Shashank Singh, co-founders, Poshn

Bhuvnesh Gupta (left) and Shashank Singh, co-founders, Poshn

Poshn is a business-to-business (B2B) platform linking aggregators and processors, mainly small and medium entrepreneurs (SMEs), with wholesalers digitally. Suppliers like processors can list the commodities that they are offering on Poshn’s platform, and in turn, buyers or wholesalers can make requests for purchase. 

The company helps match the best products, prices, and delivery scheduled between the buyer and seller, making use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. It also finances working capital for buyers. 

Three features

“We offer three features to our sellers: First, we help them reach every nook and corner, like big corporate houses such as HUL and Britannia. Our sellers, mainly processors, are SMEs who lack the might of corporate houses in reaching remote corners of the country. It is a key challenge they face,” said Shashank in an online interview with businessline along with another co-founder Bhuvanesh Gupta. 

Poshn’s second feature ensures that payments due to sellers are not locked up. “This actually locks up their payment and results in erratic capacity utilisation as they can redeploy only after the payment is realised. Now, the payment which used to take 15 days, is done in a day. We buy and release the money quickly. This has a direct impact on sales, which have increased. This also will ensure that people need not have to hold inventories,” Singh said.  

The digital platform works like this. The buyer posts his requirement on Poshn’s platform and asks to fulfill it. This is auctioned at the backend, matching prices and delivery schedules. “We have become a pillar to ensure procurement and not a vanilla discovery platform. It is a high ticket one where we own up in terms of the sanctity of prices and delivery schedules,” the co-founders said. 

Founded in 2020, Poshn, which means nutrition and signifies the sector it is in, took its time to launch itself. “We came up with this format in June last year. At the start, our revenue was ₹80 lakh. Last month, it was ₹49 crore. We expect the revenue to top ₹140 crore by the end of the current fiscal,” Singh said. 

There are a couple of things that Poshn is planning to increase its revenue further. One, it will likely explore a couple of international markets, mainly ancillary ones such as Bangladesh and Nepal to export sugar. Two, it will look to ship rice to West Asia and China, where it is used for noodles. “We will play selectively on the exports and we will do so where we have control on the supply,” he said. 

The third aspect of furthering its future is by opening partnerships with banks and non-banking finance companies (NBFCs). “This will help our customers stick with us. We are also asking banks and NBFCs to go beyond the traditional construct of balance sheets or GST filing since we bring in 100 data points on the health of our suppliers and buyers,” the Posh co-founder said.  

Financial tie-ups

Poshn, which raised ₹28.8 crore in a seed round led by Prime Ventures along with Zephyr Peacock India earlier this year, will soon open up these financial partnerships to help SMEs get direct access to working capital. 

On the role of technology, he said it gave the firm the leverage to scale up without expanding its human resources. “Technology brings the multiplier effect with the same number of people. There is no need to collect orders on a daily basis as technology captures the responses and closes the trade without any manual intervention,” Singh said. 

On its sugar trading, he said the company bids for tenders floated by mills which are allocated sales quotas by the government and blocks the quantum required for its buyers.

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