Startup Deep Dive : BigHaat — the agri-inputs marketplace that earns 85% of its revenue from farm produce

BigHaat describes itself as India’s largest digital marketplace for agri-inputs, yet 85% of the ₹1,109.1 crore (~$116 million) it booked as total income in FY25 came from selling farm produce, not from selling seeds or pesticides to farmers. That split is company-stated, given by co-founder Sateesh Nukala to Entrackr in August 2025, and the revenue figure is from the Bengaluru firm’s own filings as compiled by Inc42. The business the brand advertises and the business the P&L records are two different companies sharing one name.

That gap is the whole story. Between FY21 and FY25 BigHaat’s revenue went from ₹17.75 crore to more than ₹1,100 crore, a more than 60-fold rise in four years, and almost all of that growth came from a produce-trading arm the company only bolted on in 2021. The same arm is why gross margins sit at 15%, why the company spent ₹1.05 to earn every rupee in FY23, and why, after a decade and roughly ₹300 crore of outside capital, BigHaat is still a few crore short of a full-year profit. This piece walks through how a marketplace for farm inputs became, in accounting terms, a commodity trader, and what that means for the people who funded it.

Quick facts

What they do

BigHaat sells two things to two different customers. To India’s small and mid-sized farmers it sells farm inputs, roughly 10,000 SKUs from more than 400 brands including Bayer, Corteva and UPL, through an app, a website and a missed-call line, and wraps that shop in free, stage-wise crop advice in regional languages (Forbes India, September 2022; AgFunderNews, February 2026). To institutional buyers in India and abroad it sells the output of those same farmers, chiefly spices, grains and pulses, sourced, processed and shipped under the AgroHaat name to more than 25 countries (company website). The company says the input side reaches about 3 million monthly active farmers (company-stated, August 2025). In revenue terms the produce side is now the main event, and the input marketplace is the funnel that feeds it.

The origin

Sateesh Nukala grew up in Peddapasupula, a village in Andhra Pradesh’s Kadapa district, the son of a farmer. He left for an engineering degree at NIT Calicut and then spent 17 years at Honeywell before quitting in 2014 with no fixed plan (Forbes India, September 2022). What he did with the time off was travel through villages and watch how a farmer actually buys a bag of seed or a can of pesticide: from a local dealer, on credit, at whatever price the dealer named, on the dealer’s advice about which product to use. The dealer was both the salesman and the agronomist, and paid to be the former.

The founding insight was that a smartphone could split those two roles. If a manufacturer could list directly to the farmer, the price would be transparent and the product would be genuine; if the advice came from the platform rather than the counter, it could be tied to the crop stage rather than to the margin on the tin. Nukala started BigHaat in January 2015 with two friends who also came from farming families, Sachin Nandwana and Kiran Vunnam, piloting in a few clusters in Karnataka before extending to Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Rajasthan by the middle of that year; the company was formally incorporated in Bengaluru that September (Tofler). Inc42 and Tracxn record a fourth early name, Raj Kancham, who is no longer with the firm. The early focus, Nukala told investor Beyond Next Ventures, was horticulture: high-value crops where a farmer’s spend per acre on inputs was large enough to justify shipping a parcel to a village.

The struggle years

For its first five years BigHaat was a very small company. Forbes India’s account of the period is blunt: it was “difficult for the company to convince farmers to use their platform”, rural logistics were poor and deliveries were late, and the first institutional cheque did not arrive until 18 months after inception; Tracxn’s earliest recorded seed round is dated December 2016. The numbers confirm how slow the start was. Revenue was ₹47 lakh in FY18 and ₹80 lakh in FY19, against a FY19 loss of ₹1.9 crore, as per Inc42’s reporting in February 2021. Four years in, the company had raised a total of about $3 million from Ankur Capital, Rockstud Capital and Beyond Next Ventures and was losing more than twice what it earned.

The second struggle was the search for a model that could pay. In February 2021 BigHaat told Inc42 it would move its advisory to a freemium plan within three to four months, charging farmers a small fee for advice beyond their first crop; the article’s headline asked whether the company could scale by making farmers pay for advice. It did not happen in any visible way. By September 2022 Forbes India was still describing the advisory as a free service, and in an October 2023 founder interview the company was still offering “free agronomical services via missed call services” (Eat My News). The marketplace commission of 20% to 30% on each transaction (Inc42, February 2021) was real but sat on a small base: FY21 revenue was ₹17.75 crore (Forbes India), six years after launch.

The third came after the fix. When BigHaat added produce trading in 2021 and revenue jumped 5.3-fold to ₹643 crore in FY23, losses grew faster, up 5.8-fold to ₹35 crore from ₹6 crore in FY22, with procurement alone costing ₹623 crore, or 92.5% of total expenditure, and return on capital employed at minus 40% (Entrackr, March 2024). In February 2024 the company raised ₹69.5 crore and told Entrackr it was a “pre-Series C” ahead of a larger round in the coming months. That larger round did not close. The next money in was a ₹37 crore top-up in November 2025, which Entrackr noted was the first fundraise in more than a year, and a $10 million round in February 2026. Tracxn puts headcount at 205 in February 2026, down 6% year on year.

The turning point

The event that made BigHaat a large company was not a funding round or a product launch on the input side. It was the decision, taken in 2021, to run the network in reverse: instead of only shipping inputs to farmers, the company began buying what those farmers grew and selling it on to institutional buyers. Forbes India recorded in September 2022 that BigHaat had “since last year become a full-stack agricultural platform from seeds to market by introducing a technology-led market linkage supply chain solution”. The capital for it came from the ₹100 crore Series B led by JM Financial Private Equity in January 2022, topped up by venture debt from BlackSoil in March 2022 (Entrackr, January 2022; Inc42, March 2022).

The numbers on each side of that line are stark. In FY21, before market linkage, revenue was ₹17.75 crore. In FY22, the first partial year, it was ₹121.58 crore (Forbes India). In FY23, the first full year, gross revenue reached ₹643 crore, of which market linkages contributed ₹594 crore, or 92%, having grown 6.6-fold in a year (Entrackr, March 2024). By FY24 total income had passed ₹1,050 crore (Venture Intelligence and Inc42, from filings). A company that had taken six years to reach ₹18 crore added roughly ₹1,000 crore of annual revenue in the next three. What it did not add, at first, was margin: the FY23 EBITDA margin was minus 4.3%, and the company spent ₹1.05 for every rupee it earned (Entrackr, March 2024).

The money behind it

BigHaat has been funded in small, frequent rounds rather than one or two large ones. Total capital raised stands at about ₹300 crore as of February 2026, per Entrackr and Entrepreneur India, which on a FY25 base of ₹1,109 crore is the “6x revenue-to-capital efficiency” the founder cites. The shape of the cap table, and what each backer changed:

• December 2016 to July 2020: seed and pre-Series A. Tracxn records seed rounds in December 2016, August 2018 and December 2019; Ankur Capital, Rockstud Capital and Beyond Next Ventures were the named backers, and total funding was about $3 million by February 2021 (Inc42). Beyond Next Ventures, a Tokyo-based deep-tech investor, led a $2 million pre-Series A in August 2020 (Entrackr, January 2022) and, per Nukala, opened doors to Japanese food and technology partners and to the export-grade traceability programme that later became AgroHaat’s selling point.
• January 2022: ₹100 crore Series B led by JM Financial Private Equity, with Beyond Next Ventures participating (Entrackr, January 2022). This is the round that paid for the produce-trading pivot. JM Financial became the largest shareholder, at 27.3% by March 2024 (Entrackr); two investor nominee directors were appointed to the board in 2022 (Tofler).
• March 2022: venture debt from BlackSoil, part of a $4.5 million-plus deployment across three startups; the individual amount was not disclosed (Inc42, March 2022).
• February 2024: ₹69.5 crore ($8.4 million) pre-Series C, 6,186 compulsorily convertible preference shares at ₹1,12,366 each. Public-market investor Ashish Kacholia and RBA Finance and Investment (Suresh Agarwal) put in ₹30 crore each and ended with about 6.4% apiece; VPK Global and several individuals made up the rest (Entrackr, February 2024). Entrackr’s data at the time put total funding at $29 million and the last valuation at $58 million.
• November 2025: ₹37 crore ($4.1 million) Series C2, 3,39,450 preference shares at ₹1,090 each; JM Financial India ₹15 crore, Ashish Kacholia ₹10 crore, Suresh Kumar Agarwal ₹10 crore, plus angels. Filings said the money was for working capital and capex (Entrackr, November 2025).
• February 2026: $10 million (about ₹83 crore) led by Bidra Innovation Ventures, the US-based venture arm of Morocco’s OCP Group, a global plant-nutrition producer, with JM Financial and Ashish Kacholia returning (Entrackr, 11 February 2026; Entrepreneur India, 12 February 2026). OCP’s involvement is strategic: the stated purpose is a “traceable, globally compliant food value chain”, with Africa as the first export market for spices (AgFunderNews, February 2026).

Valuation is the least transparent number in this story. The only reported figure is $58 million, attributed to Entrackr’s data in March 2024, and no valuation was disclosed for the 2025 or 2026 rounds. The rupee issue prices, ₹1,12,366 per share in February 2024 against ₹1,090 per Series C2 share in November 2025, are for different instruments and cannot be read as a down round without the conversion terms, which are not public.

How it makes money

Three revenue lines, with very different economics:

• Market linkage and exports (the bulk). BigHaat buys spices, grains and pulses from farmers in its network, aggregates, processes and sells to institutional buyers in India and abroad through AgroHaat. Revenue is booked gross, so the full sale value shows up as income and the purchase price shows up as procurement cost. That is why procurement was 92.5% of expenditure in FY23 (Entrackr, March 2024) and why blended gross margin was 15% in FY25 (company-stated). Exports and “advanced processing”, launched in FY25, were 20% of monthly revenue by August 2025 and are described by the company as the higher-margin part of this line.
• Agri-inputs marketplace (the brand). Manufacturers list on the platform; BigHaat earns a commission of 20% to 30% per transaction as of 2021 (Inc42, February 2021), and in practice also holds inventory and ships parcels to more than 16,000 rural pin codes (Forbes India, 2022). Inputs plus digital services were 15% of revenue in FY25 (company-stated).
• Digital and data services (small, strategic). Crop advisory is free to farmers; the company processes more than a million farm-level data records a day (AgFunderNews, February 2026) and monetises that through brand marketing on the platform and through traceability for export buyers, whose certifications (GlobalGAP, BRC, organic, Rainforest Alliance, per the AgroHaat site) command a premium.

The part people get wrong is the take rate. A “marketplace” with a 20% to 30% commission sounds like a high-margin software business. BigHaat’s actual P&L is that of a trader: on ₹1,109 crore of income in FY25, filings show a net loss of about ₹29 crore and an estimated EBITDA of minus ₹6.1 crore (Inc42), with the company saying it was EBITDA positive for the final three quarters. The margin lives in procurement discipline, working capital and export premiums, not in the app.

The numbers

• Revenue growth by year: FY22 up about 6.8x on FY21; FY23 up 5.3x on FY22; FY24 up roughly 65% on FY23; FY25 up 4.4% on FY24 (Inc42). The deceleration is the single most important trend in the table.
• Loss trajectory: ₹5.65 crore in FY22, ₹35 crore in FY23, ₹26.3 crore in FY24 (filings, per Venture Intelligence), ₹28.8 crore to ₹29.1 crore in FY25 (filings, per Inc42). The company’s own figures, ₹35 crore in FY24 falling to ₹25 crore in FY25, show a sharper improvement than the filings-based series; we give both because they conflict.
• Margins: EBITDA margin minus 6% in FY22 and minus 4.3% in FY23 (Entrackr, March 2024); estimated EBITDA minus ₹6.1 crore, or about minus 0.5% of income, in FY25 (Inc42). Gross margin 15% in FY25 (company-stated).
• Balance sheet: total assets of ₹126.8 crore at the end of FY25 (Inc42); paid-up capital ₹7.25 crore (Tofler). Net worth fell about 26% in FY25 (Tofler).
• Targets: ₹1,400 crore revenue in FY26 and “full profitability” in 2026 (company-stated, August 2025 and February 2026). Nothing in the public record yet confirms either.

Where the money comes from

Segment and geography, as far as the public record allows:

• By business line (FY25, company-stated): 85% farm produce sales; 15% agri-inputs sold direct to farmers plus digital services (Entrackr, August 2025). In FY23 the filings-based split was 92% market linkages (₹594 crore of ₹643 crore) and 8% everything else (Entrackr, March 2024).
• Within produce: exports and advanced processing, launched in FY25, contributed 20% of monthly revenue by August 2025; spices are the named growth driver for FY26 (Entrackr, August 2025). AgroHaat lists chilli, turmeric, coriander, cardamom, black pepper, fennel, nutmeg and cumin among its export lines and ships to more than 25 countries (company website).
• By geography: the input marketplace delivers across 16,000-plus rural pin codes nationally (Forbes India, 2022); AgroHaat sources from ten-plus states, led by Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Kerala and Punjab (company website). Export destinations named by the company and its investors are Japan, South Korea, North America and Europe, with Africa and Southeast Asia next (Beyond Next Ventures, November 2024; AgFunderNews, February 2026).
• By customer: about 3 million monthly active farmers on the input side (company-stated, 2025); institutional food companies and importers on the produce side, none named publicly.

The surprise is how little of the revenue the “farmer platform” itself produces. If the 15% share holds, inputs and digital together were roughly ₹165 crore of FY25 income, which is close to where the whole company stood in FY22. Everything above that line is the trading book.

The risks

• Thin margins on a gross-revenue business. With procurement at 92.5% of costs (FY23) and gross margin at 15% (FY25), a two-point swing in spice or pulse prices between purchase and sale wipes out the year’s EBITDA. The company reported an estimated EBITDA of minus ₹6.1 crore on ₹1,109 crore of income in FY25 (Inc42), a cushion of half a percentage point. Commodity-price exposure is inherent to the model and is not hedged in any way the company has disclosed.
• Working-capital dependence. Buying produce from farmers means paying cash at harvest and collecting from buyers weeks later. The November 2025 filings said the ₹37 crore top-up was for “working capital requirements” (Entrackr), and the company has leaned on venture debt since 2022. Total assets were ₹126.8 crore at the end of FY25 against more than ₹1,100 crore of annual throughput; growth beyond ₹1,400 crore will need either more equity, more debt or better terms from buyers.
• Growth has stalled at the top line. Revenue grew 4.4% in FY25 after 65% in FY24 and 5.3x in FY23 (Inc42; Entrackr). The company frames this as a deliberate shift to margin over volume, and the EBITDA numbers support that reading. But a ₹1,400 crore FY26 target implies 26% growth, and the last time BigHaat grew fast, losses grew faster.
• Competition on both sides. On inputs, DeHaat, AgroStar and Gramophone run the same playbook with more venture capital behind them (Forbes India, 2022). On produce exports, BigHaat competes with established spice houses in Guntur and Unjha that have decades of buyer relationships and no burn. The export-compliance certifications BigHaat cites are a moat only as long as buyers pay for traceability.
• Financing overhang. The pre-Series C of February 2024 was meant to precede a larger round that did not come; the next equity was 21 months later and smaller. No valuation has been disclosed since the $58 million reported in March 2024. A strategic investor, OCP, now sits on the cap table, which brings distribution in Africa but also a possible ceiling on independence.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from BigHaat is that a distribution network built to push goods one way is often worth more when you run it the other way, and that the moment you do, you stop being the company your pitch deck describes. For six years BigHaat tried to make a living from the trickle of commission on inputs sold to farmers who were slow to trust an app, and it reached ₹18 crore. When it used the same farmer relationships to buy what they grew, it reached ₹1,000 crore in three years. The catch is that the P&L of the second business looks nothing like the first: it is capital-hungry, price-exposed and thin, and investors who priced a marketplace found themselves owning a trader. The founders’ answer, visible in the FY25 numbers, has been to accept slower growth in exchange for margin, and to push the trading book towards the one place where a farmer database is worth a premium, which is traceable exports. Whether that gets BigHaat from a ₹29 crore loss to a profit in 2026 is the open question. That it got the company from a village pilot to ₹1,109 crore without a unicorn round is already answered.

Frequently asked questions

What does BigHaat do?

BigHaat runs an online marketplace that sells seeds, crop protection, crop nutrition and farm equipment to Indian farmers, backed by free crop advisory, and a produce business, AgroHaat, that buys spices, grains and pulses from those farmers and sells them to institutional buyers in India and more than 25 export markets.

Who founded BigHaat and when?

Sateesh Nukala, a 17-year Honeywell veteran from a farming family in Andhra Pradesh, started BigHaat in early 2015 with Sachin Nandwana and Kiran Vunnam; the company, Bighaat Agro Private Limited, was incorporated in Bengaluru on 9 September 2015. Inc42 and Tracxn also list Raj Kancham as an early co-founder.

How much revenue does BigHaat make and is it profitable?

Filings compiled by Inc42 show total income of ₹1,109.1 crore in FY25, up 4.4% from ₹1,062.4 crore in FY24, with a net loss of about ₹29 crore. The company says it was EBITDA positive for the last three quarters of FY25 and targets full profitability in 2026.

How much funding has BigHaat raised and who are its investors?

About ₹300 crore in total as of February 2026, per Entrackr, including a ₹100 crore Series B led by JM Financial in January 2022, a ₹69.5 crore pre-Series C in February 2024, a ₹37 crore top-up in November 2025 and a $10 million round led by OCP Group’s Bidra Innovation Ventures in February 2026. Other backers include Beyond Next Ventures, Ankur Capital and Ashish Kacholia.

Is BigHaat a unicorn or planning an IPO?

No. The last reported valuation was $58 million (Entrackr, March 2024), and the company has announced no IPO plans. It has said it aims for $1 billion in annual revenue within five years, a goal stated by the founder in February 2026 and not yet reflected in any filing.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Exclusive: BigHaat crosses Rs 1,100 Cr revenue in FY25; turns EBITDA profitable”, August 2025
• Entrackr, “BigHaat raises $10 Mn led by OCP Group’s arm Bidra Innovation”, February 2026
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: BigHaat to top up Series C led by JM Financial”, November 2025
• Entrackr, “BigHaat’s gross revenue nears Rs 700 Cr in FY23”, March 2024
• Entrackr, “Update: Agritech startup BigHaat kicks off pre Series C round”, February 2024
• Entrackr, “Agritech startup BigHaat raises Rs 100 Cr”, January 2022
• Inc42, BigHaat company financials page (FY24 and FY25 filings data), accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Can BigHaat Scale Its Business By Making Farmers Pay For Its Crop Advisory Services?”, February 2021
• Inc42, “BlackSoil Invests In Blu-Smart Mobility, BigHaat, And LoanTap”, March 2022
• Inc42, BigHaat key people page, accessed September 2026
• Forbes India, “BigHaat: A crop advisory for farmers”, September 2022
• AgFunderNews, “BigHaat unveils global expansion plan, $1bn annual revenue goal as it edges towards profitability”, February 2026
• Entrepreneur India, “Agritech Platform BigHaat Secures USD 10 Mn from Bidra Innovation Ventures”, February 2026
• Entrepreneur India, “Agritech Startup BigHaat to Raise INR 37 Cr in Extended Series C Round”, November 2025
• Venture Intelligence, “Agritech startup BigHaat raises Rs.37-Cr led by JM Financial India” (FY24 filings data), November 2025
• Indian Startup News, “Agritech startup BigHaat’s FY23 revenue climbs to Rs 643Cr from 120Cr in FY22”, March 2024
• Beyond Next Ventures, “Hundred-fold Sales Growth in 4 Years: The Remarkable Rise of BigHaat” (founder interview), November 2024
• Eat My News, “Sateesh Nukala – BigHaat Digitally Penetrates the Farming Community” (founder interview), October 2023
• Tofler, Bighaat Agro Private Limited company record (CIN, incorporation, directors, capital), accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, BigHaat company and funding profile (round dates, headcount, legal entities), accessed September 2026
• BigHaat, “About Us” page, and AgroHaat website (products, export markets, certifications), accessed September 2026
• Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026

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