Startup Deep Dive : Ergos – grain banking scaled to Rs 223 crore revenue, still without a profit

Ergos runs its business the way a bank runs deposits, except the deposit is a sack of wheat. In FY25 the Bengaluru-headquartered agritech reported ₹223.7 crore ($23.3 million) in revenue, up 40.4 percent on the year before, as per company filings compiled by Tracxn and TheCompanyCheck. Yet after thirteen years in business, it has never once reported a profit.

That is the contradiction this piece works through: a company old enough to have lived through demonetisation, a pandemic and at least one year of falling revenue, still losing money at scale even as its farmer network has grown past 160,000 people across three states. The gap between what Ergos has publicly promised and what it has delivered is wider than most coverage lets on. How it actually earns, and why the arithmetic still does not close, is unpacked below.

Quick facts

What they do

Ergos sells storage, grain-backed credit access and a buyer network to small and marginal Indian farmers, most of them growing wheat, maize, paddy and pulses across Bihar, Karnataka and Maharashtra. A farmer deposits harvested grain at a village-level warehouse the company brands a “Grainbank”; the grain is quality-checked, standardised and logged against the farmer’s digital passbook, after which the farmer can either sell immediately, wait for a better price, or borrow against the stored grain through an NBFC or bank partner rather than selling in distress right after harvest (Forbes India, 2022; AgFunderNews, April 2020).

• Storage: farm-gate “Grainbank” warehouses that let farmers deposit grain in any quantity, down to a single bag (The Better India, August 2026).
• Credit access: loans against stored grain disbursed by partner NBFCs and banks, not by Ergos itself (Inc42, January 2021; AgFunderNews, April 2020).
• Market linkage: pooled sale of standardised, digitised grain to a network the company has described as roughly 1,100 traders, processors and exporters (Forbes India, 2022).

The origin

Kishor Kumar Jha grew up in an agriculturist family in Madhubani district, Bihar, before spending years in retail and premier banking at ICICI Bank and Barclays (YourStory; The Better India, August 2026). Praveen Kumar, his co-founder, brought a similar mix of corporate and farming-family experience. Between them they had watched what happens to small farmers who form roughly 80 percent of India’s farming community: unable to afford storage and under pressure to repay moneylenders, most sell their grain within 30 to 40 days of harvest, exactly when prices are at their seasonal low, and often against loans priced at 50 to 60 percent annual interest (Forbes India, 2022).

Their insight, formed before they registered the company in 2012, was to treat grain itself as a bankable asset. If a warehouse could function like a bank branch — take a deposit, issue a passbook entry, and lend against the balance — then a farmer would no longer have to choose between an immediate distress sale and an expensive informal loan. The name they gave the model, Grainbank, was meant literally: grain in, a ledger entry out, and the right to withdraw, sell or borrow against that entry later (Forbes India, 2022; AgFunderNews, April 2020).

The struggle years

The idea was simple; building it was not. Ergos started operations in April 2012, but it took thirteen months to get its first warehouse running, in May 2013, and years more before the model had any institutional backing (ergos.in/timeline, accessed September 2026). For that entire stretch the company ran on paper: farmers’ deposits were recorded in a physical khata book, not an app, because there was no app yet. The first digital platform did not go live until January 2016, and it was only in the same window, March 2015, that the bootstrapped startup closed its first equity cheque — a modest ₹4 crore from Aavishkaar Capital (Forbes India, 2022; ergos.in/timeline).

A second, less visible constraint followed. India’s Warehousing (Development and Regulation) Act allows registered warehouses to issue negotiable warehouse receipts that banks will lend against at scale. Ergos did not get its first WDRA-registered warehouse until December 2017 — more than five years after it started operating (ergos.in/timeline, accessed September 2026). Until then, its core pitch to farmers, that stored grain could unlock formal bank credit, rested on warehouses that lacked the one certification that made such credit easy to underwrite at scale. Growth tracked the constraint: the platform crossed just 10,000 registered farmers in May 2017, five years into the business (ergos.in/timeline), and had reached only about 32,000 farmers and roughly ₹126 crore in aggregate produce sales by December 2020, eight years in (Entrackr, December 2020).

The turning point

The turn came in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, when Ergos closed a ₹81 crore Series A round in stages: ₹35 crore from Aavishkaar Capital in April 2020, ₹23.5 crore from Chiratae Ventures in October 2020, and ₹22.5 crore from CDC Group (now British International Investment), a UK development finance institution, by January 2021 (Inc42, January 2021; Entrackr, December 2020; Forbes India, 2022). CDC’s participation mattered beyond the cheque size: a development finance institution’s due diligence is heavier than a typical venture check, and its entry brought Ergos a kind of institutional validation that helped pull in follow-on capital afterwards.

The before-and-after is visible in the numbers. Going into the round, Ergos was serving roughly 25,000 to 32,000 farmers from about 60 to 80 locations, almost entirely in Bihar, and had booked about ₹40.8 crore in revenue for FY21 (Entrackr, December 2020; Inc42, January 2021; Entrackr, September 2023). Within about a year, revenue had more than tripled to ₹134.6 crore in FY22, and the farmer base had grown to roughly 145,000 by April 2022, spread across 26 districts in Bihar plus expansion into Karnataka and Maharashtra (Entrackr, September 2023; Agriculture Post, April 2022). The capital did not just add warehouses; it funded the shift from a single-state, manual operation into a multi-state, tech-enabled one.

The money behind it

Ergos has raised roughly $32 million (about ₹307 crore) in total across nine rounds from Seed to Series B, according to Entrackr’s running tally of disclosed rounds and a separate compilation by Tracxn (Entrackr, September 2023; Tracxn, accessed September 2026). The funding path was slow to start and then compounded quickly:

• 2015: ₹4 crore, Aavishkaar Capital — first institutional capital, three years after founding (Forbes India, 2022).
• 2017: ₹4 crore, Aavishkaar Capital — a second small top-up, still pre-scale (Forbes India, 2022).
• April to December 2020/January 2021: ₹81 crore Series A from Aavishkaar Capital (₹35 crore), Chiratae Ventures (₹23.5 crore) and CDC Group (₹22.5 crore) — the round that funded multi-state expansion (Inc42, January 2021).
• September 2023: $10 million Series B, a mix of equity and debt, led by Abler Nordic, a Norway-based financial-inclusion fund, with Aavishkaar Capital, Chiratae Ventures and Trifecta Venture Debt Fund also participating (Entrackr, September 2023; Business Standard, September 2023; YourStory, September 2023).

Three backers stand out for what they changed rather than just what they funded. Aavishkaar Capital wrote the first cheque in 2015 and has returned in nearly every round since, the kind of repeat commitment from an impact investor that tends to matter more for a farm-gate business than a single large round would. Chiratae Ventures, entering in October 2020, brought venture-scale growth capital that coincided with the company’s shift to a multi-state technology platform. CDC Group’s 2020-21 investment brought development-finance-grade scrutiny and diluted the founders’ combined stake from 21.53 percent to 18.425 percent as CDC’s own stake rose to 14.42 percent, a rare disclosed data point on the cap table (Entrackr, December 2020). Neither the Series A nor the Series B round disclosed a valuation in the primary coverage of either round (Inc42, January 2021; Business Standard, September 2023; Entrackr, September 2023).

How it makes money

Most coverage of Ergos describes it as a storage-and-credit company, and it is, but that is not where most of its money actually comes from.

• Storage fees: farmers pay to store grain at Grainbank micro-warehouses rather than at home or with a trader (AgFunderNews, April 2020).
• Transaction facilitation: Ergos earns a margin pooling standardised grain from many small farmers into lots large enough for processors, wholesalers and exporters to buy in bulk, something an individual farmer could not offer on their own (Forbes India, 2022).
• Credit facilitation: Ergos does not lend from its own balance sheet; it connects farmers’ stored-grain collateral to NBFC and bank partners, who disburse loans of up to 70 percent of the grain’s stored value, and Ergos earns for enabling that link rather than for carrying the credit risk itself (The Better India, August 2026; Inc42, January 2021).
• Grain trading: the part that is easy to miss. In FY23, commodity sales — Ergos itself buying and reselling grain, chiefly wheat — made up 96 percent of operating income, according to its own filings (Entrackr, March 2024). The storage-and-credit story is the pitch; the trading book is the revenue line.

That trading-heavy mix explains the unit economics. In FY23, Ergos spent ₹1.11 to earn every rupee of revenue, an improvement on ₹1.19 in FY22, with an EBITDA margin of negative 8.9 percent, up from negative 16 percent the year before, and a return on capital employed of negative 69 percent (Entrackr, March 2024). Margins improved, but a trading business scaling on thin spreads is a very different, and much harder, thing to make profitable than a pure fee-based marketplace.

The numbers

Two caveats belong next to that table. First, the FY23 figure is explicitly labelled “gross revenue” in the source filing analysis, while FY24 and FY25 figures come from aggregator compilations of Registrar of Companies filings that do not specify whether the same gross-revenue basis applies, so the FY23-to-FY24 comparison should be read as directional rather than exact. Second, on the numbers as reported, FY24 was a down year — revenue fell from FY23’s level before recovering by 40.4 percent in FY25 (Inc42; Entrackr, March 2024). Losses have not been disclosed publicly for either of the two most recent years, which means the FY25 revenue recovery cannot yet be confirmed as a recovery in profitability too.

Where the money comes from

• By revenue line: commodity trading, mostly wheat, accounted for 96 percent of FY23 operating income, with storage fees, transaction facilitation and credit-facilitation income making up the remainder (Entrackr, March 2024).
• By geography: Bihar has been the core market since 2012 and still hosts the bulk of Ergos’s more than 200 Grainbank locations, with the remainder split between Karnataka and Maharashtra, states the company entered after its 2020-21 Series A (Entrackr, September 2023; Forbes India, 2022).
• By farmer base: Ergos has said it supports over 160,000 farmers as of its September 2023 Series B announcement, up from about 32,000 in December 2020 and roughly 145,000 in April 2022 (Entrackr, September 2023; Entrackr, December 2020; Agriculture Post, April 2022).

The surprise is less the geography than the mix: a company that markets itself on storage and credit access earns the overwhelming share of its revenue from being a grain trader, buying and reselling the very commodity it stores.

The risks

• Guidance versus delivery: in April 2022, founder Kishor Jha publicly targeted ₹1,800 to ₹2,000 crore in revenue by FY24 (Agriculture Post, April 2022). Actual FY24 revenue, per later aggregator compilation of filings, came in at ₹159.3 crore — roughly a twelfth of that target (Inc42/Tracxn, accessed September 2026). That gap is a useful check on how much weight to put on the company’s forward-looking statements generally.
• Revenue concentration in low-margin trading: with 96 percent of FY23 operating income coming from commodity sales rather than fees, Ergos is exposed to grain price cycles and thin trading spreads rather than the steadier take-rate economics its storage-and-credit narrative implies (Entrackr, March 2024).
• Dependence on third-party lenders: because Ergos facilitates rather than originates farmer credit, the pace and size of loans available to its farmers depend on the risk appetite of partner NBFCs and banks, a variable largely outside the company’s control (Inc42, January 2021; AgFunderNews, April 2020).

The takeaway

The lesson in Ergos is not that grain banking is a bad idea; the farmer-level evidence, from better prices to faster credit, is real and repeatedly documented. It is that a business built to solve a farmer’s problem and a business built to make money from solving it can be two different designs wearing the same name. Ergos spent its first five years proving the farmer-side model worked before it had the regulatory certification or the balance sheet to scale the credit side properly, and it has spent the years since proving that scaling storage and lending, in practice, means running a commodity trading operation with thin margins underneath a fintech-sounding pitch. Any founder selling infrastructure to a low-margin, price-volatile sector should expect the same tension: the story that raises capital and the ledger that has to close are rarely written by the same line of business.

Frequently asked questions

What does Ergos actually sell?

Farm-gate grain storage branded “Grainbank,” access to credit against stored grain through partner NBFCs and banks, and a pooled market linkage that lets small farmers sell to processors, wholesalers and exporters they could not reach individually (Forbes India, 2022; AgFunderNews, April 2020).

How does the Grainbank credit model work?

A farmer deposits grain at a village-level warehouse, where it is quality-checked and logged against a digital passbook. The farmer can then sell later at a better price or borrow up to 70 percent of the stored grain’s value from a partner lender, repaying when the grain is sold, instead of selling immediately at harvest-time lows to repay a moneylender (The Better India, August 2026; Forbes India, 2022).

Who has funded Ergos, and how much has it raised?

Roughly $32 million across nine rounds from Aavishkaar Capital, Chiratae Ventures, CDC Group/British International Investment, Abler Nordic and Trifecta Venture Debt Fund, from a first ₹4 crore cheque in 2015 to a $10 million Series B in September 2023 (Entrackr, September 2023; Tracxn, accessed September 2026).

Has Ergos ever been profitable?

Not on public record. It reported losses of ₹5.8 crore in FY21, ₹23 crore in FY22 and ₹24 crore in FY23; profit or loss for FY24 and FY25 has not been disclosed (Entrackr, September 2023; Entrackr, March 2024).

Why did revenue dip in FY24 before recovering in FY25?

Public reporting shows revenue falling from FY23’s level to ₹159.3 crore in FY24, then rising 40.4 percent to ₹223.7 crore in FY25, but the company has not published a detailed explanation for the dip, and the underlying filings compilations do not confirm the two years were measured on an identical revenue basis (Inc42; TheCompanyCheck, accessed September 2026).

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Forbes India, “Ergos: Grain as an asset and currency,” Agritech Special, 2022
• AgFunderNews, “‘Grain bank’ Ergos gets $4.6m more from existing investor Aavishkaar,” April 2020
• Entrackr, “CDC Group backs Patna-based agritech startup Ergos,” December 2020
• India Entrepreneur, “Agri-tech Startup Ergos Raises INR 38.5 Cr In Series A Funding From Chiratae Ventures,” October 2020
• Inc42, “Agri Supply Chain Startup Ergos Closes INR 81 Cr Series A With CDC Group Funding,” January 2021
• Agriculture Post, “Ergos’ GrainBank aims to clock ₹2,000 crore revenue by next year; to connect half a million farmers,” April 2022
• Entrackr, “Agritech firm Ergos secures $10 Mn in Series B funding,” September 2023
• Business Standard, “Agritech Ergos raises $10 mn as equity, debt from investors to grow biz,” September 2023
• YourStory, “Agritech Startup Ergos Raises $10 Million, Led by Abler Nordic,” September 2023
• Entrackr, “Ergos gross revenue crosses Rs 200 Cr in FY23; losses stagnant,” March 2024
• The Better India, “How Ergos Grainbanks Help Farmers Store Grain, Track Prices & Access Credit,” August 2026
• Inc42, company profile, “Ergos — Funding, Revenue & Investors,” accessed September 2026
• TheCompanyCheck.com, “Ergos Business Solutions Private Limited,” accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, “Ergos” company profile, accessed September 2026
• Ergos company timeline, ergos.in/timeline, accessed September 2026

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