Startup Deep Dive : Krishi Network — 40 lakh farmers, and revenue that only just crossed Rs 1 crore

Krishi Network says its app has been used by more than 40 lakh (4 million) Indian farmers since 2018 (Free Press Journal, 24 May 2022). Its own regulatory filings, reported independently by Tofler and Inc42, put the company’s revenue for the year ended 31 March 2024 at just ₹17.6 lakh — less than what a mid-sized dealer might turn over in a single village market in a season.

That gap between reach and revenue sat at the centre of the company’s story for years. Two IIT Kharagpur graduates who had never farmed built a free advisory platform that genuinely scaled with rural India’s internet boom, then spent the better part of five years figuring out how to charge for any of it. The company’s most recent disclosed numbers suggest it may finally be closing that gap: revenue jumped 670.3% year-on-year to ₹1.4 crore in FY25, and it reported a profit after tax of ₹37.8 lakh (Inc42, accessed September 2026). Whether that is a turning point or a blip is not yet provable from one year of data — but the underlying pattern, of scale arriving long before money, is well documented.

Quick facts

What they do

Krishi Network runs a mobile app that connects Indian farmers to a network of agricultural experts, other farmers, input brands and, more recently, paid training content. A farmer can post a question about a crop problem — a pest outbreak, a fertiliser dosage, a market price — and the platform aims to route back an answer within roughly 15 minutes, drawing on a pool of more than 8,000 registered experts (Krishi Jagran, 7 March 2022; The Better India, 7 March 2022). The app is available in Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi and English, and the company’s own reporting says it is most active in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra (The Better India, 7 March 2022). Alongside the free advisory layer, more than 30 agri-input brands use the platform to reach farmers directly, and since 2022 the company has added a second, paid business: on-demand and subscription farm training, sold under the Krishi Safal and Krishi Plus names (Free Press Journal, 24 May 2022).

The origin

Ashish Mishra and Siddhant Bhomia met the same way a lot of Indian startup co-founders do — through the IIT system, not through farming. Mishra graduated from IIT Kharagpur in computer science in 2009 and went on to work at Shiksha.com, the travel-search startup MyGola and the diagnostics company Healthians. Bhomia, an IIT Kharagpur graduate a year behind him in 2010, spent time at the analytics firm Fractal Analytics, at PwC India and later at the healthcare-data startup Innovaccer (The Better India, 7 March 2022; Krishi Jagran, 7 March 2022). Neither founder came from an agricultural household in the way the company’s later marketing sometimes implies; what they shared instead was a read on infrastructure. Around 2017, as cheap smartphone data began reaching small towns and villages at a pace India had not seen before, the two men concluded that rural India was about to get online in large numbers for the first time — and that almost nobody was building anything specifically to give those new users useful information, rather than just entertainment or messaging (The Better India, 7 March 2022).

The company they built around that bet, Cultino Agrotech Private Limited, was incorporated on 26 October 2018 and registered out of Okhla Industrial Area in New Delhi, though most of the press coverage of its early years describes its operating base as Gurugram (Tofler, Zauba Corp, accessed September 2026; Inc42 company profile, accessed September 2026). The idea was not to sell farmers anything at first. It was to become the place they went to ask a question — the theory being that trust, built for free at scale, could be monetised later once enough of it existed.

The struggle years

The trust came faster than the money. By March 2022, Krishi Network said it had connected with 30 lakh (3 million) farmers, built a base of more than 8,000 registered experts and signed on more than 30 agri-brand partners (The Better India, 7 March 2022; Krishi Jagran, 7 March 2022). That is, by the standard of most consumer apps, a genuinely large audience. And yet the company’s own filings for the financial year ending 31 March 2024 — by which point it had been operating for more than five years and had already crossed 40 lakh users two years earlier — recorded total revenue of just ₹17.6 lakh (Tofler; Inc42, both accessed September 2026). A platform that had scaled its user base into the millions was, on paper, generating less money in a year than a single well-run dealership might turn over in a fortnight.

The second, more structural setback was financing. Krishi Network’s first disclosed institutional-calibre lead investor, Rohit Razdan of ClearTax, arrived only in a seed round dated 24 January 2022 — more than three years after incorporation — and after that round closed, the company’s next recorded fundraising activity was not until 31 December 2023, almost two full years later (Tracxn; CB Insights, accessed September 2026). That gap coincided with a broader freeze across Indian agritech: sector-wide funding fell from a peak of $840 million across 62 deals in 2022 to $269 million in 2024 and then $202 million across just 36 deals in 2025 (Inc42, 22 January 2026). A company relying on a large, mostly angel-led syndicate rather than a strong repeat institutional backer was trying to build a paid business precisely as the capital that might have funded that pivot was drying up around it.

• By FY24 (year ended 31 March 2024): revenue of ₹17.6 lakh despite a self-reported user base already in the tens of lakhs (Tofler, Inc42, accessed September 2026).
• January 2022 to December 2023: roughly a 23-month gap between disclosed funding events, spanning the start of a sector-wide agritech funding contraction (Tracxn; CB Insights; Inc42, 22 January 2026).

The turning point

On 24 May 2022, Krishi Network acquired Rocket Skills, an edtech-for-farmers startup founded in 2020 that sold online training courses from agronomists and business experts. Co-founder Ashish Mishra framed the deal around a specific gap: “Indian farmers… face the problem of awareness about how to grow the crop efficiently, how to get the most out of it and lack of training” (Free Press Journal, 24 May 2022). The stated intent went beyond content — the acquisition was explicitly described as supporting the company’s “revenue targets,” a rare admission from a founder that a deal is about money, not just mission. Rocket Skills was rebranded as Krishi Safal, an on-demand training product, and the acquisition also seeded a new offering called Krishi Plus, a three-month offline subscription bundling farm visits with expert calls (Free Press Journal, 24 May 2022).

The numbers on either side of that period are the clearest evidence available of what changed, even though no source directly ties the FY25 jump to the 2022 acquisition rather than to other factors. Before: FY24 revenue of ₹17.6 lakh. After: FY25 revenue of ₹1.4 crore, a 670.3% increase, alongside a profit after tax of ₹37.8 lakh, up about 139% year-on-year (Inc42, accessed September 2026). Three years after buying its way into paid training, Krishi Network went from a company that barely monetised its user base to one posting, for the first time on the public record, a clear profit — small in absolute terms, but a genuine change in direction.

The money behind it

Krishi Network has raised a total of $1.76 million across four rounds from roughly 79 investors — 11 institutional and 68 angel — according to Tracxn (accessed September 2026). The shape of that capital:

• Angel round, first recorded 15 May 2019: the company’s earliest outside capital, ahead of any institutional participation (Tracxn, accessed September 2026).
• Seed round, 24 January 2022: $792,000, led by Rohit Razdan of ClearTax, with Delhi-based Indigram Labs (represented by Sunil Khairnar) among roughly 47 participants (Tracxn; thekredible, accessed September 2026).
• Investor addition, around 9–10 February 2022: Bollywood actor Pankaj Tripathi joined as an investor and brand ambassador, an undisclosed sum, alongside a broad syndicate of angels: Sanjiv Rangrass (ITC), Sunil Khairnar (Indigram Labs), Venkat Tadanki (Anvaya Ventures), Rushank Vora (ICICI Ventures), Aneesh Reddy (Capillary Technologies), Abhishek Goyal (Tracxn), Agam Khare (Absolute Foods), Suraj Saharan (Delhivery) and Kanav Hasija (Innovaccer) (IndianStartupNews, 10 February 2022; TheQuint, 3 March 2022).
• Funding event recorded 31 December 2023: amount undisclosed, with GrowthCap Ventures and iBOS Ventures named among participating investors (CB Insights, accessed September 2026).

Three names explain most of what changed on the cap table. Rohit Razdan, the ClearTax co-founder who led the January 2022 seed round, gave Krishi Network its first named lead investor after more than three years of running on angel capital alone. Pankaj Tripathi brought something rarer than money: a public face with a self-described farming background who could put the brand in front of a national audience beyond the startup press, joining weeks after the seed round closed (IndianStartupNews, 10 February 2022). Indigram Labs, an agri-focused early-stage investor, added sector-specific credibility that a general consumer-tech angel syndicate could not. The company’s most recent disclosed valuation — ₹63.3 crore, or about $8.24 million, as of 26 April 2022 — comes from a single tracker, Tracxn, and we could not find a second, independent source to corroborate it; readers should treat it as reported rather than confirmed.

How it makes money

For most of its life, Krishi Network’s business model has been the classic free-to-farmer, paid-by-someone-else structure common to Indian agritech advisory apps, only recently supplemented by a direct-to-farmer paid layer.

• Money in — brand partnerships: more than 30 agri-input brands pay to showcase products to farmers on the platform, the company’s original and longest-running revenue idea (The Better India, 7 March 2022).
• Money in — paid training (from 2022): Krishi Safal (on-demand courses) and Krishi Plus (a three-month offline subscription with farm visits and expert calls), built on the acquired Rocket Skills platform, add a direct-to-farmer revenue line for the first time (Free Press Journal, 24 May 2022).
• Money in — investor capital: for most of the company’s history, external funding — not customers or brand partners — has been the primary source of cash to run the business, consistent with revenue as low as ₹17.6 lakh in FY24 against a user base in the millions (Tofler; Inc42, accessed September 2026).
• Take rate / pricing: neither the brand-partnership fee structure nor Krishi Safal/Krishi Plus pricing has been publicly disclosed by the company in the sources available for this piece, so no specific rate or price point can be verified here.
• The part people get wrong: a platform with a self-reported user base in the tens of lakhs looks, from the outside, like a large digital business. Its own recent financial disclosures — ₹1.4 crore in total FY25 revenue — show a company whose actual monetised business is still tiny by the standards of funded consumer platforms at that scale, even after a 670.3% jump (Inc42, accessed September 2026).

The numbers

Only two fiscal years of revenue and profit figures for Cultino Agrotech Private Limited were independently verifiable in the sources available for this piece. An FY22 operating-revenue figure exists in Tofler’s records only as a wide bucketed range spanning ₹1 crore to ₹100 crore — too imprecise to report as a number — so it has been left out rather than guessed at.

• Revenue grew 670.3% year-on-year, from ₹17.6 lakh in FY24 to ₹1.4 crore in FY25 (Inc42, accessed September 2026).
• Profit after tax grew about 139% year-on-year to ₹37.8 lakh in FY25 (Inc42, accessed September 2026).
• Paid-up capital of the operating entity stood at just ₹3.7 lakh against an authorised capital of ₹15.9 lakh (Zauba Corp, accessed September 2026) — a reminder that this remains, by capital base, a very small private company relative to the size of its user base.
• Employee count stood at 58 as of 31 May 2026 (Tracxn, accessed September 2026).

Where the money comes from

Krishi Network does not publicly disclose a revenue split by product line or state, so what follows is what can be documented rather than a full segment breakdown.

• User geography (not revenue): the company’s own reporting names Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra as its most active states for farmer users, though it does not break out revenue by state (The Better India, 7 March 2022).
• Revenue lines, qualitatively: two disclosed lines exist — brand-partnership fees from more than 30 agri-input companies, and paid training under Krishi Safal and Krishi Plus since May 2022 — but the company has not published what share of FY25’s ₹1.4 crore came from each (Free Press Journal, 24 May 2022; Inc42, accessed September 2026).
• The surprise: a platform marketed around a multi-million-farmer network derives a total disclosed revenue, even after its best year on record, of ₹1.4 crore — smaller than the funding round it raised from Rohit Razdan alone in January 2022 ($792,000, roughly ₹6 crore at then-prevailing rates). For most of its history, capital raised from investors has dwarfed money earned from the business it was raised to build (Tracxn; Inc42, accessed September 2026).

The risks

• Monetisation still trails scale: even after a 670.3% jump, FY25 revenue of ₹1.4 crore is minuscule against a self-reported base of 30–40 lakh farmers reached since 2018 — a single bad year in the newer paid-training business could easily erase a profit measured in tens of lakhs of rupees (Inc42; The Better India, both accessed/dated as cited).
• A shrinking pool of sector capital: Indian agritech funding fell from $840 million across 62 deals in 2022 to $202 million across 36 deals in 2025, a roughly 76% decline from the peak (Inc42, 22 January 2026). A company that has raised only $1.76 million across four rounds, with its most recent disclosed funding event undisclosed in amount, is competing for capital in a market that has gotten markedly harder since its last confirmed institutional round in January 2022.
• A thin, mostly angel-led cap table: of roughly 79 investors on the register, 68 are angels rather than institutions, and the operating company’s paid-up capital is just ₹3.7 lakh (Tracxn; Zauba Corp, accessed September 2026). Without a large institutional lead investor with deep follow-on capacity, the company’s ability to fund a longer runway for its newer paid products is more exposed to individual investors’ willingness and ability to write further cheques.

The takeaway

Krishi Network’s numbers make an uncomfortable but useful point about consumer platforms built for low-income users: reach is not revenue, and the gap between the two can persist for years even when the underlying product genuinely works. The company spent roughly five years building a user base in the millions before its own filings showed anything resembling a real business — and what appears to have moved the needle was not scaling the free advisory layer harder, but buying a completely different, already-paid product category and bolting it on. For founders building anything free-to-use at scale in a market with limited disposable income, the lesson embedded in Krishi Network’s filings is specific: audience-building and monetisation may need to be treated as two separate problems, solved on different timelines, sometimes by different products entirely — not as one problem that scale alone will eventually solve.

Frequently asked questions

What does Krishi Network do?

It runs a mobile app connecting Indian farmers to a network of more than 8,000 agricultural experts for advice, alongside partnerships with over 30 agri-input brands and, since 2022, paid training products called Krishi Safal and Krishi Plus (Krishi Jagran, 7 March 2022; Free Press Journal, 24 May 2022).

Who founded Krishi Network, and when?

Ashish Mishra and Siddhant Bhomia, both IIT Kharagpur graduates, founded the company; its operating entity, Cultino Agrotech Private Limited, was incorporated on 26 October 2018 (Tofler, accessed September 2026; The Better India, 7 March 2022).

How much funding has Krishi Network raised, and who are its investors?

A total of $1.76 million across four rounds from about 79 investors, according to Tracxn. Named backers include lead investor Rohit Razdan of ClearTax, Indigram Labs, actor Pankaj Tripathi, and later GrowthCap Ventures and iBOS Ventures (Tracxn; CB Insights, accessed September 2026).

Is Krishi Network profitable?

Its FY25 filings, as reported by Inc42, show a profit after tax of ₹37.8 lakh on revenue of ₹1.4 crore, up 670.3% year-on-year — the clearest disclosed profit on record for the company, though on a very small revenue base (Inc42, accessed September 2026).

What is Krishi Network worth today?

The only available figure is a single-source estimate from Tracxn putting its valuation at ₹63.3 crore (about $8.24 million) as of 26 April 2022; we could not independently corroborate this, and the company has not disclosed a valuation from its more recent, late-2023 funding activity.

Sources

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

• The Better India, “IIT Duo Help 30 Lakh Farmers Get Timely Expert Advice on Crop, Increase Income & Yield,” 7 March 2022.
• Krishi Jagran, “Krishi Network; 30 Lakh Farmers Benefit from IIT Duo’s Timely Expert Crop Advice App,” 7 March 2022.
• Free Press Journal, “Agritech startup Krishi Network acquires edtech agri platform Rocket Skills,” 24 May 2022.
• IndianStartupNews, “Agritech startup Krishi Network onboards Pankaj Tripathi as investor and brand ambassador,” 10 February 2022.
• TheQuint, “Pankaj Tripathi Invests in a Product for Farmers, Becomes ‘Krishi Network’ Brand Ambassador,” 3 March 2022.
• Inc42, company profile for The Krishi (Krishi Network / Cultino Agrotech Private Limited), including financials and funding pages, accessed September 2026.
• Inc42, “Funding Winter Continues For Indian Agritech Startups,” 22 January 2026.
• Tracxn, company profile for Krishi Network and for Cultino Agrotech Private Limited, accessed September 2026.
• Tofler, company financials for Cultino Agrotech Private Limited (CIN U01111DL2018PTC341198), accessed September 2026.
• Zauba Corp, company record for Cultino Agrotech Private Limited, accessed September 2026.
• CB Insights, company profile for Krishi Network, accessed September 2026.
• thekredible, company overview for Krishi Network, accessed September 2026.
• YourStory, “Gurugram startup The Krishi is touching the lives of lakhs of farmers through its AI-based mobile app,” August 2019 (title and summary as indexed; full article not directly accessible at time of writing).

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