FarMart moves 11 to 12 lakh tonnes of grain and dry commodities a year, close to the tonnage of ITC’s agri-business, and it does it without owning a single truck or warehouse. In FY24 that machine turned over ₹1,341 crore (about $140 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) and still lost ₹68 crore. That gap between scale and profit is the whole story.
It is also a company that had no right to exist. FarMart began in 2015 as an Uber-for-tractors rental service, died on farmer credit defaults, tried a buy-now-pay-later card, tried a Khatabook-style ledger for village shops, and only found its business by accident when a marketing feature inside a bookkeeping app went viral. Four models, roughly four near-deaths, one survivor. This is how a twice-pivoted agritech firm became one of India’s larger private grain aggregators, and why turning that volume into durable profit is still the unfinished part.
Quick facts
| Company | FarMart (legal entity: Farmart Service Private Limited, CIN U46209UP2015PTC075364) |
| Founded | Incorporated 30 December 2015, ROC Uttar Pradesh; operations run from Gurugram/Noida |
| Founder(s) | Alekh Sanghera (co-founder, CEO) and Mehtab Singh Hans (co-founder) |
| Businesses | B2B food and agri supply-chain platform: grain and dry-commodity aggregation, SaaS for village retailers, embedded working-capital finance |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹1,341 crore operating revenue in FY24 (up 30% YoY), as per its filings reported by TheKredible and Entrackr |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹68 crore in FY24 (reported) |
| Listed | Private. Management has spoken about an IPO around 2027 (company-stated intent, not a filing) |
| Last valuation | Reported at about ₹1,800 crore (~$210 million) post the April 2025 round; an earlier 2024 equity round was pegged near $128 million |
| Key shareholders | General Catalyst, Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India), Omidyar Network India, plus founders |
What FarMart does
FarMart sells three things stacked on top of each other. It aggregates dry agricultural commodities, grain, pulses, spices and similar staples, from farmers through a network of village retailers, and sells that produce in bulk to food businesses, processors, distilleries and exporters. On top of the trade it runs software for those retailers and, underneath it, it arranges the working capital that lets small buyers and sellers transact without waiting weeks to be paid. In the company’s own framing it is building an operating system for food value chains rather than a marketplace. The customer at the paying end is a large food enterprise; the supplier at the other end is a smallholder farmer reached through a local shopkeeper.
The origin
The founding was personal before it was commercial. Alekh Sanghera’s grandfather farmed near Jalandhar for six decades and told his city-educated grandson that, for all of India’s tech progress, farming had become an unrespected and unprofitable life. Sanghera had spent time in rural finance, including auditing Direct Benefit Transfer flows for the Gates Foundation, so he had seen up close why cash dried up in the countryside: over 85% of Indian farmers are smallholders, fewer than a fifth have institutional credit, and equipment rental alone could eat up to a third of a season’s earnings.
In December 2015 Sanghera and his boarding-school friend Mehtab Singh Hans quit consulting jobs and moved to a small town in Uttar Pradesh to build something for that farmer. The first idea was simple and wrong: if a tractor costs more than a smallholder can justify, let them rent one on demand. An Uber for tractors. The insight about under-mechanised farms was real. The mechanism to pay for it was not.
The struggle years
What followed was a run of failures that most companies would not have survived, each of which taught the founders something that the eventual business needed.
The tractor-rental model died on credit. Farmers who rented could not always repay, and defaults broke the unit economics before the network could grow. The second attempt was a buy-now-pay-later credit card for farmers; by the founders’ account it actually reached profitability, but it could not scale before India’s UPI rails matured and changed what a payment product had to be. The third attempt was a Khatabook-style digital ledger for village retailers, a genuinely sticky product that shopkeepers used, except that rural India would not pay a software subscription for it. Three products, three different ways to run out of road: default risk, timing, and unwillingness to pay for SaaS.
Each pivot burned time and cash and forced a rebuild of the product and the team’s assumptions. The company that emerged in 2020 kept almost nothing of the original tractor pitch except the relationships it had built with thousands of village retailers, and a hard-won understanding of why rural cash flows collapse. That understanding, not any single product, is what eventually paid off.
The turning point
The turn came from inside the failed ledger app. A marketing SMS feature that let retailers broadcast to their contacts went viral, and it revealed what the founders had been missing: the 10,000-plus village retailers on the platform were not customers to be charged a subscription, they were a ready-made, decentralised procurement network. As Sanghera has put it, the money in India is in commerce, not subscription. FarMart stopped trying to sell software to shopkeepers and started using shopkeepers to source grain.
The numbers on either side of that pivot are stark. In FY22, the first full year of the new B2B model, operating revenue was ₹208 crore. In FY23 it jumped almost five-fold to ₹1,033 crore, and in FY24 it reached ₹1,341 crore. A company that had spent five years failing to charge farmers and shopkeepers found that it could instead be paid by the large food businesses that needed reliable bulk supply, and route the value back down the chain. The asset-light structure, no owned trucks, no owned warehouses, meant that scale did not require building physical infrastructure first.
The money behind it
FarMart’s cap table filled out only after the model worked. The funding shape, by round and named backer:
- Pre-Series A: about $2.4 million, June 2021 (reported by YourStory).
- Series A: $10 million, October 2021, led by Matrix Partners India (now Z47), with InnoVen Capital, Omidyar Network India, Avaana Capital and 500 Startups (Entrackr, YourStory).
- Series B: $32 million, March 2022, led by General Catalyst with participation from Matrix Partners India and Omidyar Network India (multiple reports).
- Follow-on: ₹24 crore (~$2.8 million) equity from Swiss asset manager ResponsAbility Investments, May 2024 (Entrackr).
- Latest disclosed: ₹84 crore (~$10 million) in April 2025, blending equity and debt, GC India put in ₹43 crore of equity, Z47 ₹1 crore, and Stride Ventures and Trifecta added ₹40 crore in non-convertible debentures (Entrackr).
- Total raised: reported at roughly $50–60 million across the equity rounds by Entrackr and Tracxn; the company has separately stated a higher cumulative figure of around $78 million including debt. Treat the range, not a single number, as the honest answer.
- Latest valuation: about ₹1,800 crore (~$210 million) post-money after the April 2025 round, per Entrackr; an earlier 2024 equity round had been pegged near $128 million.
- What the backers changed: Matrix/Z47 and Omidyar came in around the pivot and funded the shift from SaaS to commerce; General Catalyst’s Series B underwrote national scale-up; the 2024–25 rounds leaned on debt to fund working capital rather than dilute further.
How it makes money
The counter-intuitive part of FarMart’s model is that it tries not to make money on the grain itself. Management’s stated view is that if you take margin on the trade you hurt either the farmer or the buyer, so revenue is designed to come from services layered around the transaction. The published components:
- Platform and offtake fees charged to buyers for reliable, aggregated supply.
- Finance origination, reported at roughly 0.5% to 1.5% of the financed amount, earned by arranging working capital rather than lending off its own balance sheet.
- Logistics fees on movement coordinated across an asset-light fleet (the company works with thousands of fleet partners and owns no trucks).
- Software and digitisation services, including an ERP for food processors and manufacturers introduced in 2025.
The working-capital mechanism is the clever piece. FarMart securitises institutional invoices through SEBI-registered NBFCs, routing capital from asset managers into farmer payments, in effect converting the creditworthiness of large buyers into liquidity for small sellers. Because the top-line is largely pass-through trade value, the reported revenue is huge relative to the thin service margins the company actually keeps, which is exactly why a ₹1,341 crore revenue line still sat under a ₹68 crore loss in FY24. The part outsiders get wrong is reading that revenue as if it were a software company’s; most of it is commodity value flowing through the platform.
The numbers
Three years of audited operating revenue and reported bottom line, in ₹ crore:
| Fiscal year | Operating revenue (₹ crore) | Net profit/(loss) (₹ crore) |
| FY22 | 208 | Not separately reported here |
| FY23 | 1,033 | (49) |
| FY24 | 1,341 | (68) |
A few things to read from that table. Revenue grew about five-fold from FY22 to FY23, then a more normal 30% from FY23 to FY24, the shape of a business moving from land-grab to steadier growth. Losses widened from ₹49 crore to ₹68 crore over the same stretch, so scale was still being bought, not banked. Detailed audited FY25 figures were not reliably in the public record at the time of writing; a bucketed data-platform estimate put FY25 revenue “above ₹1,000 crore,” which is too imprecise to state as a hard number, so it is left out here rather than guessed. Separately, management has claimed an annualised run-rate near ₹3,600 crore and EBITDA-positive quarters entering FY26; those are company-stated and not audited filings, and are flagged as such.
Where the money comes from
The revenue mix maps to a wide base of participants at each end of the chain:
- Supply side (reported): a network in the region of 3 million-plus farmers reached through roughly 60,000 village retailers, with the retailer acting as aggregator and last-mile node.
- Demand side (company-stated / reported): large food buyers and processors. Names cited across coverage and company material include Reliance Retail, Britannia, Parle and grain distilleries, with other reports listing ITC, Olam and Cargill among buyers; treat specific client names as reported rather than audited.
- Commodity spread: 40-plus dry commodity categories rather than a single crop, which spreads seasonal and price risk.
- Geography: concentrated in roughly a dozen states, with genuinely pan-India coverage still a work in progress.
The surprise in the mix is the growth vector management is chasing: margins expand sharply as produce moves up the value ladder. Bulk B2B trade carries roughly 11–12% gross margin, processed exports far more, and quick-commerce private-label products (the FarMart Pantry brand of atta, basmati and millets) potentially higher still. India’s E20 ethanol blending, reached in 2025, also turned distilleries into a large new grain buyer, and FarMart positioned itself as an aggregator for that demand. These upside figures are company-stated targets, not achieved results.
The risks
The risks are structural, not cosmetic, and several the company or its analysts acknowledge:
- Thin, pass-through margins. Because most of the ₹1,341 crore FY24 top line is commodity value, a small movement in service take or in bad-debt costs swings the whole P&L; the business was still loss-making at ₹68 crore in FY24. Profit depends on operating discipline at very low percentage margins.
- Working-capital and credit risk. The model’s edge, financing farmers against buyer invoices via NBFCs, is also its exposure. If a large buyer delays or defaults, or if credit tightens for the NBFC partners, the liquidity engine that pays farmers can seize up, the same failure mode that killed the original tractor-rental model.
- Regulatory and demand concentration. A meaningful slice of the growth thesis rests on the government’s ethanol-blending mandate and on a handful of large buyers. Policy changes to ethanol pricing or blending, or the loss of a major account, would hit disproportionately. Geographic concentration in about a dozen states adds to the single-market exposure.
- Competition with deeper pockets and, in some cases, profits. DeHaat crossed ₹3,000 crore in FY25 revenue and reported a net profit, Ninjacart has raised over $400 million, and Bijak competes directly in B2B commodity trade. FarMart is not the best-funded player in its own category.
The takeaway
The transferable lesson from FarMart is not “pivot until it works,” which is survivorship bias dressed as strategy. It is narrower and more useful: the founders kept failing at charging the poorest party in the chain, the farmer, then the shopkeeper, and only succeeded when they moved the point of payment to the richest party, the large food buyer, and let value flow back down. The asset they carried through four failed models was not a product but a relationship, 10,000-plus village retailers, that turned out to be worth more as a network than as customers. When a business refuses to die, it is often because one asset built during the failures quietly became the whole company. The open question, and the one the ₹68 crore FY24 loss keeps asking, is whether moving grain at ITC-like scale can be made to pay at software-like margins. FarMart has proved it can move the volume. It has not yet proved it can keep the profit.
Frequently asked questions
Is FarMart a unicorn?
No. FarMart’s reported valuation is far below $1 billion, around ₹1,800 crore (~$210 million) after its April 2025 round per Entrackr, with an earlier 2024 equity round pegged near $128 million. It is a mid-stage private company, not a unicorn.
Who founded FarMart and when?
Alekh Sanghera and Mehtab Singh Hans, boarding-school friends, founded it in 2015; the legal entity Farmart Service Private Limited was incorporated on 30 December 2015 in Uttar Pradesh. Sanghera is co-founder and CEO.
How does FarMart actually make money if it doesn’t take margin on grain?
It earns from services layered around the trade: platform and offtake fees from buyers, finance origination of roughly 0.5%–1.5% for arranging working capital, logistics fees, and software including an ERP for food processors. The commodity value mostly passes through, which is why revenue is large but margins are thin.
Is FarMart profitable?
Not on an audited annual basis in the latest available filings. It reported a net loss of ₹68 crore in FY24 on ₹1,341 crore of operating revenue. Management has stated it reached EBITDA-positive quarters entering FY26, but that is a company claim, not an audited full-year result.
Who are FarMart’s main competitors?
In B2B agri supply chains its closest peers are DeHaat, which crossed ₹3,000 crore in FY25 revenue with a reported profit, Ninjacart, which has raised over $400 million, and Bijak in commodity trading.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr — FarMart raises ₹84 crore ($10M) equity and debt, April 2025; and FarMart raises from ResponsAbility Investments, May 2024; and Matrix Partners leads $10M round, October 2021.
- TheKredible — FarMart financials (FY22–FY24 revenue and losses), 2024–2025.
- Tofler / thecompanycheck / IndiaFilings — Farmart Service Private Limited registry details (CIN, incorporation date, directors), updated 2026.
- Tracxn — Farmart Service Private Limited company and legal-entity profile, 2026.
- YourStory — “Two pivots, 4 near-deaths: How FarMart pulled through,” June 2022; and FarMart Series A funding alert, October 2021.
- FounderThesis — “How Alekh Sanghera Built FarMart,” 2025–2026 (founder interview; run-rate, tonnage and margin figures are company-stated).
- Inventiva — FarMart FY23 revenue coverage, 2024.
- Decentro / Inc42 — Indian agritech landscape and competitor financials (DeHaat, Ninjacart, Bijak), 2025–2026.
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