Startup Deep Dive : Intello Labs — a 20-minute quality check became 2 minutes, then revenue halved anyway

A four-month pilot at a Reliance Fresh procurement centre once cut a quality-check decision from 20 minutes to 2, a 90% drop that convinced a food retailer to trust a camera over a human eye. Nine years and four funding rounds later, the company behind that camera reported a full year of revenue smaller than the loss it booked in a single earlier year.

That is the contradiction sitting at the centre of Intello Labs: a Gurugram-based computer-vision startup that helped normalise AI grading of fruit and vegetables across Indian and export supply chains, backed by Saama Capital, Omnivore and the Singapore-based GROW fund, and yet one whose own disclosed filings show revenue nearly halving between FY22 and FY25 even as it expanded into Europe, South Africa and Australia.

Quick facts

What they do

Intello Labs builds computer-vision tools that grade the quality of fresh produce, spices and nuts as they move through a supply chain, replacing the human eyeballing that has historically decided whether a truckload of tomatoes or a carton of apples is accepted, rejected or price-adjusted. Its customers sit on both sides of that decision: growers and packhouses who want a defensible, repeatable grade before they sell, and large buyers such as organised retail chains, exporters and food-service companies who want an objective check before they pay. According to the company’s own site, its tools have been used to assess more than 100,000 metric tonnes of produce and are trained on more than 1 billion images, spanning commodities from apple and citrus to pomegranate, mango, onion and tomato, with reported use in India, Europe, South Africa and Australia.

The origin

The founding insight, as Intello Labs describes it, was almost banal in how obvious it sounds once stated: in fresh produce trade, quality is the variable that decides price, and yet quality was the one thing nobody measured objectively. A grader’s eye, mood and incentive all crept into a decision that determined how much a farmer got paid and what a retailer put on a shelf. Milan Sharma, an IIT Bombay graduate who had spent more than a decade in pricing and analytics roles at Snapdeal and dunnhumby, teamed up with Nishant Mishra, an IIT Bombay classmate with a background in deep learning and big data at Amazon, Yahoo and Canon, along with Himani Shah and Devendra Chandani, to found the company in Gurugram in 2016. The idea was to put a camera and a trained model between the produce and the decision, so that a grade could be repeated, audited and defended the same way twice.

The struggle years

The gap between a working pilot and a durable business is where Intello Labs’ record gets less flattering, and its own disclosed numbers do not soften it. Revenue fell from ₹12.3 crore in FY22 to ₹6.4 crore in FY24 and then to ₹5.4 crore in FY25, a decline of roughly 56% across three fiscal years, even as the company’s own website was describing an expanding footprint into Europe, South Africa and Australia through 2022 (Inc42 Datalabs; Intello Labs company site). FY22 alone carried a net loss of ₹30.0 crore against that ₹12.3 crore of revenue, and by FY25 the company was still posting a net loss of ₹8.5 crore on a smaller topline (Inc42 Datalabs).

The second strain is capital. Intello Labs closed its Series B on 8 December 2022 and, as of this piece’s research in September 2026, has not disclosed a fresh institutional round since, meaning close to four years without a public funding event. That drought lines up with a sector-wide contraction: Indian agritech funding fell from about $802 million in 2022 to $178 million in 2023, a roughly 78% drop, and had only recovered to about $160 million by 2025, according to Entrackr’s tracking of the sector. Headcount has moved in the same direction. Tracxn’s tracking of the legal entity put Intello Labs at about 54 employees as of March 2026, down 12% year-on-year, a marked contraction from the 101–200-employee band that a company profile from accelerator network Unreasonable Group had once listed for the firm.

The turning point

The event that gave Intello Labs its first credible proof point happened early, in 2017, through the JioGenNext accelerator programme, which connected the young company with Reliance Retail. The team was invited to pilot its grading tool at Reliance Fresh’s Central Procurement Centre in Mumbai, where quality supervisors were deciding, largely by eye, whether incoming fruit and vegetables met the retailer’s standard. Before the pilot, that decision reportedly took around 20 minutes per assessment. Over a four-month trial, Intello Labs’ image-based grading cut that decision-making turnaround to about 2 minutes, a 90% reduction, while also standardising the call across supervisors and shifts, as the company recounted to YourStory in 2020. What began as a bounded pilot evolved, in the company’s own account, into a larger deployment with the retailer, and gave Intello Labs the reference customer it needed to court its first institutional investors two years later.

The money behind it

Intello Labs has raised money in four disclosed rounds, and the same small cluster of agritech-focused funds recurs through nearly all of them:

• Seed, March–April 2019: $2.0 million from Nexus Venture Partners and Omnivore, the company’s first institutional backers (Omnivore’s own announcement, April 2019; Inc42; AgFunderNews).
• Series A, May 2020: $5.9 million led by Saama Capital, with participation from Singapore-based agritech fund GROW, SVG Ventures THRIVE and existing backers Omnivore and Nexus Venture Partners (YourStory, May 2020; Food Logistics, 2020).
• Series A3, September 2021: ₹37.3 crore (about $5 million) led by Avaana Capital, with Omnivore, Saama Capital and Nexus Ventures also investing, at a reported post-money valuation of about ₹246 crore ($34 million) (Venture Intelligence).
• Series B, closed 8 December 2022: ₹23.24 crore (about $2.82 million) led again by Saama Capital, with Avaana Capital, Omnivore, Nexus Ventures and AgFunder each contributing, at a reported post-money valuation of about ₹630 crore ($77 million) (Entrackr, December 2022; corroborated by Venture Intelligence’s separate cap-table reporting).

Across the four rounds, Tracxn’s tracker put total funding at approximately $16.6 million as of its 2026 snapshot; Entrackr had separately calculated the cumulative figure at $15.72 million immediately after the Series B closed in December 2022, a consistent trajectory once the small gap between the two counts is allowed for. Two backers changed the company’s trajectory most visibly: Omnivore and Nexus Venture Partners came in at seed stage and stayed through every subsequent round, giving Intello Labs continuity of agritech-sector expertise on its cap table; Saama Capital arrived at Series A and returned to lead Series B two and a half years later, effectively underwriting the company through the period when Indian agritech funding was cooling sharply.

How it makes money

Intello Labs does not publish a rate card, take rate or unit economics, so what follows is drawn from how the company itself describes its offering rather than an audited breakdown. Its money comes in through three channels that most outside observers, expecting a pure software subscription, tend to underestimate:

• Hardware sales and deployment: proprietary sorting and grading machines, such as Intello Sort and the FlowStar weighing-and-packing line, sold or deployed to packhouses and processors, which is a capital-equipment sale rather than a recurring software fee.
• Software and app-based grading: Intello Track, an image-based grading tool delivered through a smartphone app, used by field staff and quality supervisors to standardise on-the-spot assessments.
• Digital Mandi, a trade and data layer: launched in 2020, this connects quality-graded produce with remote buyers, and the company frames it as the piece that turns a one-off grading transaction into an ongoing trading relationship.

The part people tend to get wrong, on the evidence available, is treating this as a software business with software margins. A meaningful share of what Intello Labs sells is physical equipment and on-site deployment, which carries hardware costs, installation and after-sales support baked into the price, a structure that helps explain why a company approaching a decade old and roughly $17 million of cumulative funding is still recording losses larger than its revenue in its most recent disclosed year.

The numbers

Public financial disclosure for Intello Labs is thin and not annually complete in third-party trackers; the table below shows the fiscal years for which figures could actually be verified, with a gap noted rather than filled.

Two things stand out from what is verifiable. First, the FY22 loss of ₹30.0 crore against ₹12.3 crore of revenue suggests a period of aggressive, funding-backed spend, consistent with a company that had just closed its Series A3 round in September 2021. Second, the FY25 loss of ₹8.5 crore is smaller in absolute terms than the FY22 loss, even though revenue nearly halved over the same stretch, which points to real cost discipline, the kind that typically accompanies a headcount reduction of the sort Tracxn recorded into 2026, rather than to any topline recovery (Inc42 Datalabs; Tracxn).

Where the money comes from

Intello Labs does not publish a revenue split by product line, customer or geography, so the picture here is necessarily qualitative rather than a percentage breakdown. What is verifiable is the shape of its footprint and its named customers:

• Anchor market: India remains the base, built on the Reliance Fresh relationship that began with the 2017 pilot and, per the company, evolved into a larger deployment.
• Named enterprise customers: Reliance Fresh and Amazon India are listed as customers on the company’s own site, alongside Dole Asia, indicating a customer base weighted toward large organised retail and export players rather than small individual farmers.
• International footprint: the company’s own milestone timeline dates expansion into Europe and South Africa to 2022, with Australia also listed among active markets, meaning four countries in total as described by the company.
• Product mix: revenue is generated across hardware (sorting and packing machines), software (the Intello Track grading app) and the Digital Mandi trading layer, rather than from a single product.

The surprise, given that geographic and product breadth, is that none of it shows up as revenue growth in the disclosed filings: the international expansion the company dates to 2022 sits in the same period as the start of the FY22-to-FY25 revenue decline, which suggests that entering new geographies added cost and complexity faster than it added billable business, at least on the evidence available through FY25.

The risks

• Losses still outrunning revenue: FY25 revenue of ₹5.4 crore against a FY25 net loss of ₹8.5 crore means the company was spending more than one-and-a-half times its topline in its most recently disclosed year, a gap that has to close through either sharp revenue growth or further cost cuts, or it will keep drawing down a cap table that has not seen a new round since December 2022 (Inc42 Datalabs).
• A sector-wide capital drought: Indian agritech funding fell from about $802 million in 2022 to $178 million in 2023 and remained near $160 million in 2025, per Entrackr’s tracking, which narrows the pool of investors available to lead a next round for a company whose last one closed at the top of that funding cycle.
• Concentration around a handful of large anchor customers: the customer names the company discloses publicly, Reliance Fresh, Amazon India and Dole Asia, are all large organised buyers rather than a broad base of smaller accounts; losing or scaling back with any one of them would fall on a revenue base already down to single-digit crores.
• Competition from equipment incumbents building AI in-house: global sorting-machine makers such as TOMRA Food have launched their own AI-powered grading products, including a deep-learning tool marketed as LUCAi, which lets an established hardware seller bundle computer-vision grading into a machine sale rather than buy it from a separate vendor, a structural threat to a company whose own business partly depends on selling that same hardware-plus-AI combination (The Packer, 2025).

The takeaway

Intello Labs’ clearest lesson is that a strong proof point does not compound automatically. Cutting a quality decision from 20 minutes to 2 inside a four-month pilot was enough to win a marquee retail partner and, in time, four rounds of institutional funding from investors who understood agritech. But converting that credibility into a growing, defensible revenue line, across hardware, software and a trading platform, at the same time as expanding into new countries, turned out to be a harder and slower grind than the pilot suggested, and the company’s own disclosed numbers through FY25 show revenue shrinking rather than compounding even as its footprint widened. For any founder building trust-as-a-product in a market that has never priced trust explicitly before, the harder problem is rarely proving the technology works once. It is monetising that proof at a scale that outruns your costs, through a funding cycle that will not always be generous.

Frequently asked questions

What does Intello Labs actually sell?

It sells a combination of computer-vision hardware (sorting and grading machines such as Intello Sort and FlowStar), a smartphone-based grading app called Intello Track, and a produce trading platform called Digital Mandi, used by growers, packhouses, retailers and exporters to assess and trade fresh produce, spices and nuts on an objective quality grade rather than a visual estimate.

Who founded Intello Labs and when?

It was founded in Gurugram in 2016 by Milan Sharma, Nishant Mishra, Himani Shah and Devendra Chandani. Sharma, the CEO, previously worked in analytics roles at Snapdeal and dunnhumby, while Mishra, the CTO, came from deep-learning and big-data roles at Amazon, Yahoo and Canon.

How much funding has Intello Labs raised, and who are its main backers?

It has raised approximately $16.6 million across a seed round and three subsequent rounds since 2019, according to Tracxn’s 2026 tracking. Its most consistent backers are Nexus Venture Partners and Omnivore, both seed investors who stayed through every later round, alongside Saama Capital, which led its Series A in 2020 and its Series B in December 2022, and Avaana Capital, which led its September 2021 round.

Is Intello Labs profitable?

No. Its most recently disclosed fiscal year, FY25 (ended 31 March 2025), showed a net loss of ₹8.5 crore on revenue of ₹5.4 crore, and its FY22 loss of ₹30.0 crore was more than double that year’s ₹12.3 crore of revenue, according to Inc42 Datalabs’ compilation of its filings.

What is Intello Labs’ current valuation and stage?

Its last disclosed valuation was a post-money figure of about ₹630 crore ($77 million), reported after its Series B round closed on 8 December 2022. As of September 2026, it remains a private company with no new funding round, stock listing or IPO filing disclosed since then, and its own headcount tracking shows a reduction to about 54 employees.

Sources

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

• Omnivore, “Agritech startup Intello Labs raises $2mn seed round from Nexus Venture Partners and Omnivore,” April 2019
• Inc42, “Omnivore And Nexus Venture Invests $2 Mn In Agritech Startup Intello Labs,” 2019
• AgFunderNews, “EXCLUSIVE: India’s Intello Labs Raises $2m Seed Round to Measure Quality of Food Crops with an App,” 2019
• YourStory, “How a pilot with Reliance Fresh helped Intello Labs disrupt the fresh food supply chain,” April 2020
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] Gurugram-based Intello Labs raises $5.9M in Series A round from Saama Capital, others,” May 2020
• Food Logistics, “Intello Labs Raises $5.9M in Series A Round,” 2020
• Venture Intelligence, “Agritech startup Intello Labs raises Rs.37-Cr from Avaana, Saama Capital, Nexus, Omnivore,” September 2021 round reporting
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Intello Labs raises nearly $3 Mn in Series B,” December 2022
• Inc42, “Agritech Startup Intello Labs Bags Funding From Saama Capital, Existing Investors,” December 2022
• Inc42 Datalabs, “Intello Labs Financials 2026 – Revenue, P&L & Cash Flow,” accessed September 2026
• Tofler, “Intello Labs Private Limited” company financial and incorporation record, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, “Intello Labs Private Limited” company profile and financials, accessed September 2026
• Entrackr, “India’s agritech at inflection point: funding revival, profitable models, and consolidation,” 2026
• Intello Labs, company website and “About Us” page, accessed September 2026
• Unreasonable Group, “Intello Labs” venture profile, accessed September 2026
• The Packer, “Tomra Food launches two AI-powered sorting and grading solutions,” 2025

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.