Gramophone, an Indore-based Agri-Tech startup, is ushering in a significant change in the Indian farming sector with its unique idea. It uses data to guide a farmer in selecting the right agricultural inputs for maximum yield and crop harvesting. The company claims to have reached more than 7 lac farmers increasing their income based on improved farming practices. The Indore-based firm claims that its intervention in the sector has helped its farmer customers increase their yields by 40% by acting upon its advisory. The startup is aiming to reach 10 lakh farmers by the end of 2021.
Founded in 2016 by Tauseef Ahmad Khan, Nishant Vats Mahatre, Harshit Gupta and Ashish Rajan Singh, the platform also provides farmers crop advisory, agronomy advice, dynamic weather and price updates, learnings on crop diseases, and recommendations on agri inputs and machinery to better tailor what they do to crops to conditions on the ground. The startup also provides information on seeds, fertilisers, the kind of nutrients to add to a crop, what crop diseases to protect from, soil management techniques, best prices for agri inputs, etc.
The Krishi Mitra app launched by the startup is helping farmers in Madhya Pradesh come up with the right solution. The startup provides its services through digital touchpoints (mobile app/web). The non-internet users can also avail themselves of the services by simply giving a missed call. It also offers vernacular advisory for rural users in multiple regional languages. The company’s prosperity kit helped farmers in Madhya Pradesh’s Dhar save their Garlic crop which was nearly destroyed due to heavy rain but the Gramophone helped these farmers restore their produce. The startup’s product Maxroot also helped a farmer in Khandwa get better root growth in his Soyabean crop. The startup also guided a farmer in MP’s Sakri village to achieve better growth bumper yield from onion richness kit producing 1000 quintals of onion in 10 bigha land.
Last December, the agri-tech startup had raised Rs 25 crore in a Series B funding round. The round was led by deep tech investor Siana Capital, with participation from returning investors Info Edge, Asha Impact and Better Capital. Before the recent funding round, Gramophone had raised $4.5 Mn in three funding rounds from 10 investors
