6 hours Ago By Anand Chandra
After a surge in 2021, agritech has seen a steep pullback due to the broader correction across global markets and the complexity of the sector itself Initiatives like eNAM, the JAM trinity, and AgriStack are laying important digital rails for agritech startups Many agritech ventures have entered the market intending to disrupt it with tech solutions that have worked well in Western countries India’s agritech sector is not short on breakthroughs. Over the past decade, we’ve seen technology deployed at the last mile – from satellite-enabled crop monitoring to embedded credit linked directly to post-harvest flows. Mandi networks are being mapped digitally and storage infrastructure coming in places where logistics used to end.
These aren’t experiments or pilots. They are structural interventions, operating quietly but persistently in one of the world’s most complex economic landscapes. And yet, in a country where agriculture remains the primary livelihood for more than half the population, not a single agritech venture has crossed into unicorn territory.
Is this simply a question of valuations? or does it point to a deeper misalignment – between how success is defined in venture capital circles and how progress actually manifests in rural India? Agriculture, by its nature, resists centralisation. No two farming regions in India are alike. Cropping patterns, price signals, procurement systems – they all vary, sometimes dramatically, within the span of a few hundred kilometres.
There is no “average” user to build for. The idea of a product that can scale uniformly across this diversity may work in urban digital ecosystems, but agriculture demands something else: depth before width. Many agritech ventures have entered the market intending to disrupt it with tech solutions that have worked well in Western or European countries, but there is no guarantee they will work in Indian conditions.
In practice, this means that agritech businesses need to establish trust and build infrastructure long before they can think of rapid expansion. Growth in this sector isn’t triggered by ad budgets or app installs. It begins with showing up, earning trust, and staying invested in a local ecosystem over multiple seasons.
That kind of growth takes time, patience, and capital that isn’t always chasing the next quarter’s spike. The Indian agri-ecosystem is also not easy to crack. On one hand, over 80% of farmers are small and marginal, making affordability a key challenge.
On the other hand, more than 60% of the population is highly price-sensitive. A unique combination for any country. This slowness is not a lack of ambition but a reflection of the ground reality.
Agritech ventures often operate in physically intensive, asset-linked domains – storage, logistics, credit, procurement – all of which are vital to the economy but don’t fit the typical mould of high-margin, asset-light tech plays. They build long-term systems, not viral loops. It’s not surprising that many of these businesses, even when profitable, are not valued like their consumer tech counterparts.
The investor lens – often optimised for speed and scale – struggles to accommodate businesses where capital efficiency trumps hypergrowth, and where impact builds gradually, not exponentially. The funding cycles reflect this discomfort. After a surge in 2021, agritech has seen a steep pullback due to the broader correction across global markets and the complexity of the sector itself.
Credit-linked models face tighter regulatory oversight. Commerce-led platforms need deep working capital and robust risk controls. Climate-focused interventions take years to show measurable outcomes – longer than most funds are structured to wait.
Those who do stay invested are often the ones who understand this cadence. But they are few, and the capital they bring is limited. This mismatch between business timelines and investor expectations continues to constrain the sector.
Policy infrastructure, too, is catching up. Initiatives like eNAM, the JAM trinity, and AgriStack are laying important digital rails. But core enablers – like digitised land records, interoperable procurement systems, and identity-linked farmer onboarding – remain patchy.
As a result, startups often find themselves building what should already exist. Expanding into new regions becomes not just a business decision, but a reinvention exercise – a fresh set of partnerships, local alignments, and ground work, every single time. Even so, none of these constraints compare to the central challenge in agritech: trust.
This sector doesn’t operate on click-throughs or conversion funnels but on relationships. A farmer, especially a smallholder working with thin margins, cannot afford a failed experiment. They do not engage because of branding or UI but because someone turned up during harvest, followed through on a commitment, and returned the next season.
Growth in agritech isn’t fuelled by distribution; it is earned through delivery. And that kind of growth may look slow from the outside but it’s also deeply defensible. It creates businesses that are embedded, resilient, and grounded in the economics of the real world.
These businesses may not attract headlines, but they create real value – not just in terms of revenue, but in the outcomes that matter: reduced distress sales, higher price realisation, better access to credit, and stronger local markets. So, will India see an agritech unicorn? Perhaps. But if and when it happens, it won’t look like a blitzscaling app.
It will be operationally intensive, financially prudent, and deeply rooted in the rural economy. It may even seem unimpressive to those outside the sector – until you notice what it’s actually achieving. And maybe that’s the more useful question to ask.
Not when we’ll see an agritech unicorn, but whether startups are shifting how agriculture functions. Are they creating more stable income flows? Are they connecting producers to better markets? Are they reducing risk and friction across the chain? Because the right indicators of progress in this space will never be valuations alone. They’ll be found in things like the number of FPOs that have viable balance sheets, the percentage of harvest that stays in local storage instead of being dumped at the nearest mandi, or the credit that now flows to previously excluded producers.
Agritech in India isn’t lacking ambition. What it lacks is identified & quantifie problem driven solutions, patient capital, systems-level support, and a narrative that understands how deep, slow, and complex progress here actually is. The unicorns will come.
But long before they do, the real work – the meaningful change – is already happening. Quietly, deliberately, and closer to the farm than ever before..
