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Startup Deep Dive : Akshayakalpa — 27 Wipro engineers built an organic dairy company now valued near Rs 1,500 crore

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Akshayakalpa.

In 2010, twenty-seven engineers at Wipro Technologies pooled part of their monthly salaries to bankroll a dairy business none of them had ever run. Fifteen years and six near-bankruptcies later, that experiment is a private company investors valued at close to Rs 1,500 crore (~$156 million) in November 2025.

Akshayakalpa Organic sells organic milk, curd, ghee, butter, cheese and paneer to roughly 60,000-plus daily consumers across three south Indian cities, sourced from a network of small farmers who own no processing infrastructure of their own. Getting there took a decade of scraping for cash, at least one strategy reversal that changed the company’s entire distribution model, and a founder who still personally calls up his old Wipro colleagues when the balance sheet gets tight. This piece traces the money, the near-misses and the mechanics of how a milk company built by software engineers now competes with government dairy cooperatives on their own turf.

Quick facts

Company Akshayakalpa Organic (AkshayaKalpa Farms and Foods Private Limited)
Founded 2 October 2010, Tiptur, Karnataka
Founder(s) Shashi Kumar (Founder-CEO) and Dr G.N.S. Reddy, backed at inception by 27 Wipro colleagues
Businesses Organic milk, curd, ghee, butter, cheese, paneer and buttermilk, sold via subscription app, quick commerce and retail
Latest FY revenue Rs 387-395 crore, FY25 (sources vary; see Sources)
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss, reported as Rs 6.5 crore by one source and Rs 27.3 crore by another, FY25
Listed Private; no IPO announced as of September 2026
Market value / last valuation ~Rs 1,500 crore (~$156 million), reported November 2025
Key shareholders / CEO Shashi Kumar (Founder-CEO); backers include ABC Impact (Temasek-backed), A91 Partners, Rainmatter, British International Investment, Catamaran Ventures, Asha Ventures

What they do

Akshayakalpa Organic produces and sells certified organic milk and dairy products under its own brand, positioning itself as India’s first digital-first, farmer-network dairy company. It does not own farmland or cattle. Instead it enrols small and marginal farmers across Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Telangana, guides each one through a multi-year conversion to organic certification, buys their entire output at a fixed price, and sells the finished milk, curd, ghee, butter, cheese, paneer and buttermilk to urban households in Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad through its own delivery app, quick-commerce platforms and retail counters. The customer it is chasing is the same one Amul and Nandini already have on their doorstep every morning, except Akshayakalpa is asking that household to pay roughly double for a subscription and a traceability story.

The origin

The company was not built around a dairy insight. It was built around a question that bothered Shashi Kumar, a Bengaluru-born engineer who had spent 17 years in the technology industry, 13 of them at Wipro Technologies, after a master’s degree in telecommunication engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago: why were young people leaving farming, generation after generation, including his own family after six generations on the land? Kumar teamed up with veterinarian and social entrepreneur Dr G.N.S. Reddy, and 27 of his Wipro colleagues volunteered to contribute part of their salaries to fund the idea. They surveyed villages in Tumkur, Hassan and Chikmagalur districts of Karnataka looking for farmers willing to switch to organic dairy farming. It took the fledgling company almost two years to produce its first litre of certified organic milk. The founding bet was not “sell organic milk” so much as “prove a farmer can earn a dignified, predictable income without leaving the village” – the product came second.

The struggle years

What followed was not a clean growth curve. By the founders’ own account, the company came close to bankruptcy roughly six times across its first twelve to thirteen years, as it tried to build a fragmented, capital-intensive supply chain without a reliable route to paying customers. Selling through intermediaries and wholesalers left the company exposed to price-cutting and payment delays, and cash routinely ran out before the next harvest of milk could be converted into revenue. Shashi Kumar has described the recurring fix: “Every time we ran into a trouble, we would get into a conference call and I would personally ask my ex-colleagues at Wipro to contribute anything from Rs 50,000 to Rs 50 lakh so that the business could sustain.” The company came close to shutting down altogether around 2016, before emergency funding and a change in go-to-market strategy pulled it back from the edge. Unsoftened, the pattern was this: a decade of a founder personally fundraising from friends every time the model wobbled, because no institutional investor wanted to underwrite a company selling milk through the same broken channel as everyone else.

The turning point

The rescue came from abandoning wholesale distribution altogether. Around 2016, the company began shifting toward direct, scheduled home delivery instead of selling through shops and distributors, betting that urban buyers who cared about food purity would pay a premium and stay loyal if the product simply turned up reliably. It worked. “This online pivot helped us to go cash flow positive with Rs 30 crore sales in 2019,” Kumar has said, describing customers who “were not just willing to pay a premium for our products, they were also extremely brand loyal” – loyalty that meant Akshayakalpa could build scale without the distributor overheads or heavy advertising spend that sink most consumer start-ups. The numbers either side of that pivot are stark: from a company that was fundraising Rs 50,000 at a time from ex-colleagues to survive, to one recording Rs 30 crore in annual sales by 2019 and, on one industry account, roughly 13 times that figure – about Rs 395 crore – by FY25.

The money behind it

Akshayakalpa has raised capital in deliberately spaced-out rounds rather than one large war chest, consistent with a founder who talks about “slow can beat fast.” Dealroom’s tracker put total funds raised at $62.4 million as of September 2026, though the company itself has not confirmed a single cumulative figure.

What each backer changed: Lok Capital was the proof-of-concept cheque that let the founders stop personally bankrolling the business; BII brought development-finance patience and later co-structured a farmer-financing partnership with fintech lender Samunnati; Rainmatter (backed by Zerodha’s Nithin Kamath) and A91 Partners brought consumer-brand investing discipline as the company moved from a rural supply-chain story to a D2C one; and ABC Impact’s entry in the Rs 350 crore round was explicitly an impact-investing bet on the farmer-income model scaling further, with enough size to also clear out an early investor’s stake.

How it makes money

The business is, at its core, an arbitrage between what it costs to produce genuinely certified organic milk and what urban Indian consumers will pay for the promise of purity and traceability.

The numbers

Reported revenue and losses vary somewhat by source and filing period; figures below are as reported, in Rs crore.

Fiscal year Revenue (Rs crore) Profit / (loss), Rs crore
FY22 ~115 Not disclosed
FY23 191-194 (up ~66-67% YoY) (36), up 89% YoY
FY24 286 Not disclosed
FY25 387-395 (up ~38% YoY) (6.5) per one source; (27.3) per another

Where the money comes from

Two different splits are useful here – by channel, and by product.

The surprise is how much of the volume now comes from a channel – quick commerce – that did not exist for the company a few years ago, and how thin the wholesale tail has become for a business that started life entirely dependent on it.

The risks

The takeaway

The lesson in Akshayakalpa’s history is not that organic dairy is a good business – the company spent nine years and six near-collapses proving it almost wasn’t. The lesson is that a supply-chain company can survive its worst years on a channel it doesn’t yet believe in, provided it is honest about which channel is actually paying for the whole operation. Akshayakalpa’s founders kept trying to make wholesale distribution work because that was the obvious, “normal” way to sell milk, and it nearly killed the company six times over. The thing that worked was the one nobody had budgeted for: a direct relationship with a customer willing to pay double and stay subscribed. Any founder sitting on a subsidised, low-margin core channel while quietly building a small, higher-margin direct one should read that as a signal to lean into the smaller number, not the bigger one.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Akshayakalpa Organic and when?

Shashi Kumar and Dr G.N.S. Reddy founded the company on 2 October 2010 in Tiptur, Karnataka, with 27 of Kumar’s former Wipro colleagues contributing part of their salaries to fund it (Wikipedia; Inc42, 2026).

How much has Akshayakalpa Organic raised in funding?

Across disclosed rounds it has taken in Rs 40 crore from Lok Capital in 2019, $15 million in a September 2022 Series B, Rs 100 crore in a January 2024 Series C, a Rs 350 crore round in November 2025, and a Rs 175 crore Series D reported in March 2026; Dealroom’s tracker puts total funding at $62.4 million as of September 2026.

Is Akshayakalpa Organic profitable?

Not at the full-year level as of FY25, which closed with a net loss reported as either Rs 6.5 crore or Rs 27.3 crore depending on the source. The company has said it turned EBITDA-positive at roughly a 5% margin in the first quarter of FY26, with its Bengaluru market profitable while Chennai and Hyderabad were still loss-making as of late 2024.

What is Akshayakalpa Organic’s latest valuation?

Investors valued the company at roughly Rs 1,500 crore (~$156 million) in a Rs 350 crore round reported in November 2025, up from about Rs 590 crore after its January 2024 Series C; a further Rs 175 crore Series D was reported in March 2026.

Does Akshayakalpa Organic own its own farms?

No. It partners with independent farmers who convert to its organic protocol over a multi-year period, typically financing a roughly Rs 25 lakh, 25-cow unit through a bank loan, and then sells the farmer’s entire output at a fixed, fat-content-linked price of Rs 28-32 per litre.

Sources

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

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