Startup Deep Dive : Farmley — audited losses undercut its EBITDA-positive claim

In May 2025, Farmley told the press it had turned EBITDA positive in FY25. Seven months later, its own audited filings, analysed by financial trackers from Registrar of Companies data, showed an EBITDA margin of minus 3.68% and a net loss of ₹22.5 crore on revenue of ₹394 crore ($41 million) for that same year.

The gap between the announcement and the filing is not a scandal — it is how most Indian D2C funding rounds are narrated, with the flattering number timed to the raise and the audited number arriving quietly a year later. What makes Farmley worth a closer look is everything around that gap: a founder who shut down a functioning ₹350 crore B2B business to bet on a brand nobody had heard of, a pandemic tailwind he did not plan for, and a supply chain built on direct relationships with more than 5,000 farmers that is only now being tested by scale.

Quick facts

What they do

Farmley sells packaged dry fruits, nuts and roasted-snack formats — flavoured makhana (fox nuts), roasted cashews and almonds, date bites and trail mixes — to Indian consumers looking for a snack that reads as healthier than chips or biscuits. It sells through its own website and app, through Amazon and Flipkart, through quick-commerce apps such as Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart, and increasingly through general-trade kirana stores, modern-trade chains such as Reliance Fresh and Spencer’s Retail, airline catering (Air India, IndiGo) and corporate canteens. A smaller export business ships the same products to Indian-diaspora consumers in the United States, Canada, Australia and the UAE. Underneath the consumer brand sits a sourcing-and-processing operation the company built during its earlier life as a wholesaler: five farm-gate processing units and direct buying relationships with more than 5,000 farmers across states including Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Haryana.

The origin

Akash Sharma grew up in Bharatpur, Rajasthan, in a farming family, and went on to study at IIT Delhi. What he saw in the dry-fruits trade was not a marketing problem but a plumbing one: a supply chain running through several layers of middlemen between farmer and shelf, each layer adding a margin and stripping out traceability, so a consumer buying almonds or cashews had no real way of knowing where they came from or how fresh they were. After IIT, he met Abhishek Agarwal, an IIT Roorkee graduate, and the two decided to attack the plumbing first rather than the shelf. They incorporated Connedit Business Solutions Private Limited on 6 July 2017 and set Farmley up as a business-to-business supplier — buying directly from farmers, processing the produce themselves, and selling in bulk to the ecommerce platforms and retail chains that would otherwise have bought from a trader. “We were not trying to be a brand,” Sharma has said of that period. “We were trying to fix a broken system.”

The struggle years

The B2B model worked well enough to build real infrastructure — five processing units, a farmer network, import relationships for cashews and almonds — but it did not build a defensible business. Bulk buyers in the dry-fruits trade switch suppliers for a fraction of a rupee’s difference in price, and Sharma has described the margin pressure bluntly: customers would walk for a 0.5% price gap, with no brand loyalty to hold them. That commoditisation shows up plainly in the company’s own numbers. Revenue climbed to ₹203.8 crore in FY22, then fell 16.7% to ₹169.8 crore in FY23 as the company began weaning itself off the wholesale business, according to financial-data tracker TheKredible’s analysis of Registrar of Companies filings. The same filings show a net loss of ₹219.27 crore in FY22, narrowing sharply to ₹33.1 crore in FY23 — a swing large enough, relative to revenue, that it points to a one-off accounting charge rather than pure operating losses, though no source opened for this piece explains the FY22 figure in detail. Two things had to happen before Farmley could call itself a snacking brand: the founders had to accept that the wholesale business they knew how to run was structurally low-margin, and they had to be willing to walk away from a business that, as Sharma has put it, was doing roughly ₹350 crore in the years just before the pivot.

The turning point

In early 2021, Farmley shut its B2B channel completely and relaunched as a direct-to-consumer brand, first on its own website and on Amazon and Flipkart, then on the quick-commerce apps that were just beginning to scale in urban India. The timing lined up with two forces outside the founders’ control: the Covid-19 pandemic had pushed Indian consumers toward foods marketed as immunity-boosting, and quick commerce was turning snacking into an impulse category that could be delivered in minutes. “Snacking is an impulse category, so quick commerce was tailor-made for us,” Sharma has said. The founders themselves describe the decision to exit a working ₹350 crore B2B business for an unbuilt consumer brand as the hardest call of their careers — betting existing infrastructure and farmer relationships on a name the market did not yet know. On the other side of that bet: a D2C business that took FY24 revenue to ₹230.66 crore, then FY25 revenue to ₹394 crore, a 71% jump in a single year, according to Entrackr’s and Inc42’s independent analyses of the company’s FY25 Registrar of Companies filings, both published in late December 2025.

The money behind it

Farmley has raised a total of roughly $55 million across four disclosed institutional rounds since 2020, per Inc42’s funding tracker and corroborated by Tracxn’s company profile:

• Seed, January 2020: $2 million, led by agri-focused fund Omnivore, with participation from Insitor Partners — capital that helped fund the early pivot infrastructure before the 2021 relaunch.
• Series A, August 2022: $6 million, led by DSG Consumer Partners with Alkemi Growth Capital participating — DSG’s consumer-sector network is credited by the company with pushing Farmley toward a multi-channel retail strategy rather than staying purely digital.
• Series B, December 2023: $6.74 million (about ₹50 crore), led by B.C. Jindal Group — the roughly $2.5 billion packaging, films and steel conglomerate — with DSG Consumer Partners, Omnivore and Alkemi Partners also participating, per Entrepreneur India and the company’s own funding disclosures.
• Series C, 12 May 2025: $40 million, led by global consumer-focused private equity firm L Catterton, with existing backers DSG Consumer Partners and B.C. Jindal Group participating, per Inc42 and Entrepreneur India. About 70% of the round was fresh primary capital; the remaining 30% was a secondary sale that let early investors Insitor Partners and Samunnati fully exit, alongside some employee ESOP encashment, per cofounder Abhishek Agarwal’s own account to Inc42.

The company’s own funding announcements have not disclosed a valuation figure — Inc42’s and Entrepreneur India’s May 2025 coverage of the Series C both state explicitly that valuation was not shared. Independently, both Tracxn and Inc42’s data platforms estimate the post-Series C valuation at roughly $109-110 million (about ₹944 crore) as of May 2025; because this figure comes from tracker estimation rather than company or investor confirmation, it should be read as reported, not settled.

How it makes money

Farmley earns money the way any packaged-food brand does — sell a product for more than it costs to source, process, market and ship — but its argument for why its margin should eventually work is backward integration. By buying directly from more than 5,000 farmers and running its own processing units instead of buying pre-processed stock from traders, it captures a layer of margin that a pure reseller would not. In practice, FY25’s cost structure shows how heavily that promise still rests on raw-material efficiency rather than pricing power:

• Cost of materials: ₹280.8 crore in FY25, roughly 67% of total expenditure of ₹419 crore — Farmley is, first and foremost, exposed to the price of almonds, cashews and makhana (Entrackr, Inc42, both citing FY25 Registrar of Companies filings, December 2025).
• Advertising and marketing: ₹51.8-52 crore in FY25, up roughly 96-101% year-on-year — spending on customer acquisition grew faster than revenue, which itself grew 71% (Entrackr, Inc42, December 2025).
• Employee benefit expense: ₹27.2 crore and logistics costs of roughly ₹20 crore in FY25 (Entrackr, December 2025).
• Unit efficiency: the company spent ₹1.06 to earn ₹1 of operating revenue in FY25, an improvement on the ₹1.12 it spent per rupee earned in FY24 (Entrackr, December 2025).

The part people tend to get wrong is treating Farmley’s ubiquity on quick commerce and its Rahul Dravid-fronted advertising as evidence that the business is already profitable. It is not, on the numbers filed with the Registrar of Companies: FY25’s EBITDA margin came in at minus 3.68% and its return on capital employed at minus 51.56%, even as the company told the press two months earlier that it had “achieved positive EBITDA in FY25” (Inc42, 12 May 2025, on the claim; Entrackr and Inc42, both December 2025, on the audited outcome).

The numbers

Four years of revenue and net loss, as reported from the company’s Registrar of Companies filings (₹ crore):

• FY22-FY23: revenue fell 16.7% as the company exited its legacy B2B wholesale channel; the FY22 loss figure is unusually large relative to revenue and likely reflects a one-off, non-recurring charge rather than a pure operating loss, though the filings summary used here (TheKredible) does not itemise the cause.
• FY23-FY25: revenue compounded from ₹169.8 crore to ₹394 crore as the D2C and quick-commerce business scaled, while net loss steadily narrowed each year.
• FY25 vs FY24: revenue up 71%, total expenditure up 63% to ₹419 crore, net loss down 15% (Entrackr, Inc42, December 2025).
• For FY26, the company has publicly targeted revenue of ₹600-700 crore (Entrackr, December 2025) and, separately, a three-year ambition of ₹1,000 crore in turnover built on offline and export expansion (Afaqs!, 24 July 2025).

Where the money comes from

Two different snapshots, 18 months apart, show the channel mix shifting, even if online commerce still dominates:

• February 2024 (Medianews4u): online contributed around 70% of revenue, with the remaining 30% from offline and institutional outlets; average online basket size was about ₹400, with a 40% repeat-purchase rate.
• July 2025 (Afaqs!): offline had grown to “more than 20%” of total revenue, with the company targeting a 55:45 online-to-offline split within three years; it was present in more than 175 Indian cities across roughly 20,000 general-trade outlets, aiming for over 200,000.
• Exports: under 2% of revenue as of mid-2025, with direct import-export links in five countries and a stated target of 5-10%, focused on Indian-diaspora demand in the US, Canada and Australia (Afaqs!, 24 July 2025).
• Product milestones: the date-bites line was the fastest product to cross ₹50 crore in cumulative sales, and the standalone offline business crossed a ₹10 crore annualised-revenue milestone (Afaqs!, 24 July 2025).

The surprise is less which channel leads — online still does, comfortably — and more how small Farmley’s physical footprint remains against its own ambitions: 20,000 outlets is a rounding error against India’s roughly 13 million kirana stores, which is exactly why the company frames its next three years around general-trade and export expansion rather than doubling down on quick commerce alone.

The risks

• Commodity and input-cost exposure: with cost of materials at 67% of FY25’s total expenditure (₹280.8 crore of ₹419 crore, per Entrackr and Inc42), Farmley’s margin is directly hostage to almond, cashew and makhana prices, which move with weather, crop yields and import costs rather than anything the company controls.
• Rising customer-acquisition cost against a still-negative EBITDA margin: advertising spend grew roughly 96-101% year-on-year to ₹52 crore in FY25, faster than the 71% revenue growth it was meant to drive, while EBITDA margin remained negative at -3.68% and ROCE at -51.56% (Entrackr, Inc42, December 2025) — growth is currently being bought, not yet compounding on its own.
• Distribution risk from larger incumbents: India’s snacking aisle is dominated by scaled players — Haldiram’s, ITC, Britannia and PepsiCo among them — and large FMCG groups have begun buying their way into healthy-snacking adjacencies, such as Hindustan Unilever’s acquisitions of OZiva and Wellbeing Nutrition; Farmley’s farmer-sourcing story is a genuine point of difference, but it does not by itself guarantee shelf space against companies with vastly larger distribution networks (Inc42’s B2B-pedigree profile of the company).

The takeaway

The lesson in Farmley’s numbers is not that the company is failing — losses have narrowed every year since FY23 and revenue has nearly doubled since FY23 — it is that revenue growth and press-release profitability claims are not the same evidence as an audited profit and loss statement, and a well-run reader should always ask for the second one. Farmley itself is proof that a founder can walk away from a working, if commoditised, business and rebuild something bigger on the same underlying assets; it is also proof that rebuilding the topline is the easier half of that bet, and that fixing the margin — not just growing the brand — is the part still in progress.

Frequently asked questions

What does Farmley sell?

Farmley sells packaged dry fruits, nuts, flavoured makhana and date-based snacks, distributed through its own website and app, ecommerce marketplaces, quick-commerce apps, general and modern trade, airline catering and a small export business to Indian-diaspora markets abroad.

Is Farmley profitable?

No, not on an EBITDA basis as of its most recent audited fiscal year. Farmley’s FY25 Registrar of Companies filings show a net loss of ₹22.5 crore and an EBITDA margin of -3.68%, even though the company told the press in May 2025 that it had achieved positive EBITDA for that year (Entrackr and Inc42, December 2025; Inc42, May 2025).

Who founded Farmley and when?

Farmley was founded by Akash Sharma and Abhishek Agarwal, with the underlying legal entity, Connedit Business Solutions Private Limited, incorporated on 6 July 2017. The business operated as a B2B dry-fruits wholesaler before relaunching as a consumer brand in early 2021.

How much funding has Farmley raised?

Farmley has raised roughly $55 million across four institutional rounds: a $2 million seed round in January 2020, a $6 million Series A in August 2022, a $6.74 million Series B in December 2023, and a $40 million Series C in May 2025 led by L Catterton, per Inc42’s funding tracker.

What is Farmley’s latest valuation?

Farmley has not publicly disclosed a valuation. Data platforms Tracxn and Inc42 both independently estimate it at roughly $109-110 million (about ₹944 crore) following the May 2025 Series C round, but this figure is a tracker estimate rather than a company-confirmed number.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “Farmley — Funding, Revenue & Investors” company and funding-tracker pages (accessed September 2026)
• Inc42, “D2C Snacking Brand Farmley Bags $40 Mn” (12 May 2025)
• Entrepreneur India, “Farmley Raises $40 Million in Series C Led by L Catterton” (12 May 2025)
• Entrackr, “Farmley nears Rs 400 Cr revenue in FY25, losses under control” (26 December 2025)
• Inc42, “Farmley FY25: Loss Narrows, Revenue Soars 71% To INR 394 Cr” (31 December 2025)
• TheKredible, “Farmley posted 16% drop in scale in FY23, losses shrink 85%” (retrieved September 2026)
• Tracxn, company profile for Farmley / Connedit Business Solutions Private Limited (accessed September 2026)
• AZB & Partners, deal notice for Connedit Business Solutions Private Limited’s Series C round (accessed September 2026)
• Inc42, “How Farmley’s B2B Pedigree Helped Build An INR 350 Cr D2C Snack Brand” (accessed September 2026)
• Entrepreneur India, “Farmley: Breaking the ‘Dry’ Spell In Dryfruits Market” (accessed September 2026)
• Medianews4u, “Online contributes 70 percent of Farmley’s revenue: Akash Sharma” (6 February 2024)
• Afaqs!, “Farmley’s Rs 1,000 crore hustle rides on retail push and export play” (24 July 2025)

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