Ninjacart moved more than 1,400 tonnes of fruit and vegetables a day at its peak, was once the best-funded agritech startup in India, and still has never crossed the $1 billion mark that would make it a unicorn. In FY25 its revenue fell by roughly a fifth even as the company insists it is closer to profit than ever.
That contradiction — shrinking on paper while claiming to be healthier underneath — is the whole story of Ninjacart. It is a company that chose to be smaller and less impressive-looking on purpose, in a sector where almost every peer that chased scale instead has since shut down.
Quick facts
| Company | Ninjacart (Ninjacart Agritech Private Limited / Ninjacart India Private Limited) |
| Founded | 2015, Bengaluru; pivoted from a B2C grocery app to a B2B fresh-produce supply chain around 2016–17 |
| Founders | Thirukumaran Nagarajan, Vasudevan Chinnathambi, Kartheeswaran KK, Sharath Loganathan, Ashutosh Vikram and Sachin Jose |
| Businesses | Farm-to-retail fresh produce supply chain; fulfilment for retailers, traders, HoReCa and quick-commerce platforms; an agri-credit partnership with Avanti Finance |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹1,634–1,705 crore in FY25 (reports vary; see The numbers) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹256 crore in FY25 |
| Listed | Private; company has said it is targeting an IPO within roughly two years of July 2026 |
| Market value / last valuation | $815 million as of January 2022 (later marked at $756 million in one tracker) — the company has never confirmed crossing $1 billion |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Thirukumaran Nagarajan (CEO); Tiger Global, Walmart, Flipkart, Accel, Syngenta Ventures and Nandan Nilekani among investors |
What they do
Ninjacart runs a business-to-business supply chain for fresh fruit and vegetables. It buys produce from farmers and mandis across roughly 150 markets, grades and sorts it at collection centres, and delivers it — typically within about 12 hours of harvest — to kirana stores, restaurants, traders, large retail chains and, increasingly, the dark stores of quick-commerce apps. The customer is never the end consumer; it is always someone else’s shop or kitchen. The pitch to that customer is simple: fresher produce, fewer middlemen, and a predictable price, delivered without the retailer having to visit a wholesale mandi at four in the morning.
The origin
Ninjacart was founded in Bengaluru in 2015 by six people — Thirukumaran Nagarajan, Vasudevan Chinnathambi, Kartheeswaran KK, Sharath Loganathan, Ashutosh Vikram and Sachin Jose — several of whom had worked together at the proptech company CommonFloor. Nagarajan, an engineering graduate of PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, had passed through Hindustan Unilever and ABB before a stint at the cab-hailing startup TaxiForSure, which Ola acquired in 2015, as per Ninjacart’s own founder profiles and contemporary interviews.
The company did not start as the business it is known for today. It launched as a hyperlocal, consumer-facing grocery delivery app — a bet on the then-fashionable idea that Indians would order their vegetables on a phone the way they ordered a cab. The founding insight that actually mattered came later, once the team was inside the produce supply chain: farmers were absorbing enormous, avoidable waste and price risk because produce changed hands through four or five layers of traders before reaching a shop, while retailers were paying inflated prices for inconsistent quality. Fixing that middle — not the last mile to a consumer’s door — was the real opportunity, as Nagarajan and the company have described it in later interviews with YourStory and StartupTalky.
The struggle years
The first setback was the original business itself. Sometime around 2016, after roughly a year of running the consumer app, the founders concluded that customers would not pay a premium for the marginal convenience of ordering vegetables online — a category where price sensitivity is brutal and loyalty is low. That forced a full pivot from B2C to B2B, rebuilding the company around a customer (the retailer) it had not originally been designed to serve, according to StartupTalky’s account of the shift and Nagarajan’s own retelling of it.
The second, sharper shock arrived with the COVID-19 lockdown in late March 2020. Disruption to farm harvesting, transport and demand caused Ninjacart’s transaction volumes to fall by roughly half in the initial days of the lockdown, and operating restrictions meant the company could function only two to four hours a day at points, according to reporting at the time by The Ken and YourStory. It responded by launching “Harvest the Farms,” a direct farmer-to-apartment-complex sales channel, to keep produce moving and cash flowing while its normal retail customers were shut.
The most recent contraction was self-inflicted and came in FY25: the company chose to shut down low-margin, non-core trading lines — chiefly a lower-margin FMCG trading business — which is the direct reason its reported revenue fell by close to a fifth that year even as its loss held roughly flat, as Ninjacart told Business Standard and Startuppedia in disclosures covering the year.
The turning point
The moment Ninjacart stopped being just another agritech app and became the sector’s best-capitalised player was April 2019, when Tiger Global Management led a Series C round that closed at roughly $100 million (an initial $89–90 million tranche, topped up by $10 million later that year) — at the time reported as Tiger Global’s largest India bet, by YourStory and Entrackr. Before that round, Ninjacart had been valued at roughly $89.5 million coming out of its December 2018 Series B; the Series C round pushed that to a reported $320 million post-money, according to StartupTalky’s funding history. Being suddenly the most heavily funded company in Indian agritech is what put Ninjacart on Walmart and Flipkart’s radar: the two invested in the company for the first time that December, beginning a relationship that would deepen into a much larger cheque two years later.
The money behind it
Ninjacart’s funding built up in fairly distinct phases: Accel backed the Series A in 2017–18; Accel and Syngenta Ventures led a roughly $33.5 million Series B in December 2018; Tiger Global then led the ~$100 million Series C in April 2019 described above; and Walmart and Flipkart, having first invested in December 2019, returned to lead a $145 million round in December 2021 that valued the company at $815 million, per Entrackr’s contemporaneous report. A separate Entrackr sector analysis published in July 2025 independently lists Ninjacart’s latest valuation as the same $815 million figure and its cumulative raise at roughly $370 million, while the funding tracker Tracxn (cited via StartupTalky) put the total nearer $508 million across ten rounds and showed the valuation easing to about $756 million by May 2022 — the kind of gap that is common once secondary and internal-tracker estimates are mixed with disclosed round sizes.
Three backers changed the company’s trajectory in distinct ways. Accel supplied the earliest institutional conviction and stayed in through the company’s most recent 2026 raise. Tiger Global’s 2019 cheque was what made Ninjacart fundable at scale and pulled in the interest of strategic retail money. Walmart and Flipkart then went further than a cheque: they gave Ninjacart a captive, demanding customer in Flipkart’s grocery business and Walmart’s Best Price cash-and-carry stores, which forced the supply chain to industrialise faster than pure venture capital alone would have pushed it. In July 2026, Accel, Tiger Global and Nandan Nilekani (an early personal backer via the NRJN Trust) put in the first $6 million tranche of a fresh, multi-tranche round explicitly aimed at funding the run-up to an IPO, per Entrackr — with the company declining to disclose a valuation this time.
How it makes money
The single biggest misconception about Ninjacart is that it runs like a digital marketplace — a fintech-style business that clips a commission on transactions it never has to hold on its own balance sheet. It does not. By the company’s own disclosure to Entrackr for FY23, about 80% of its gross revenue came from actually buying and reselling produce — taking ownership of tomatoes, onions and bananas, warehousing them, and selling them on at a markup — with the remaining 20% coming from commissions and credit facilities extended to retailers and farmers. Reported markups on produce have ranged from roughly 5% to 15% depending on the crop and channel, with the company targeting a blended gross margin in the 12–15% band on fresh produce.
That structure means Ninjacart’s costs are dominated by procurement — in FY23, cost of goods purchased accounted for about 71% of total expenditure, according to Entrackr’s breakdown of the company’s filings — followed by employee costs and logistics. It is a working-capital-heavy, inventory-owning trading business wearing the branding of a tech platform, which is precisely why its margins are thin and its path to profit runs through volume and waste reduction rather than through software economics. The part the company is now emphasising to justify its shrinking top line: its fulfilment business for retailers, traders and quick-commerce players has reportedly been growing at over 100% year-on-year and, it claims, has already reached operating profitability, as stated in its FY25 disclosures reported by Business Standard and Startuppedia in December 2025 and April 2026.
The numbers
Ninjacart’s revenue climbed for three straight years before reversing sharply in FY25, when the company deliberately exited lower-margin trading lines. Different outlets label the underlying line item slightly differently — “gross revenue” versus “operating revenue” — which is why FY24 and FY25 figures vary by report; both versions are given below.
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Net loss (₹ crore) |
| FY22 | 967 | 308 |
| FY23 | 1,600 (gross) | 325 |
| FY24 | 2,002.7–2,081.5 (gross/operating, reports vary) | ~260 |
| FY25 | 1,634–1,705 (reports vary) | 256 |
The FY22 and FY23 figures come from Entrackr’s reporting on the company’s regulatory filings (November 2022 and October 2023). FY24’s ₹2,002.7 crore gross-revenue figure is Entrackr’s (October 2024); Business Standard’s December 2025 report and a Startuppedia report dated April 2026 instead put the prior year at ₹2,007 crore and ₹2,081.5 crore respectively — both citing it as the base against which FY25 declined. For FY25 itself, Business Standard reported operating revenue of ₹1,634 crore while Startuppedia reported ₹1,705 crore; both agree the net loss was ₹256 crore, essentially flat against FY24’s roughly ₹260 crore. Ninjacart has said the FY25 revenue fall reflects a deliberate exit from low-margin, non-core trading segments rather than a shrinking core business.
Where the money comes from
By Ninjacart’s own FY23 disclosure, roughly 80% of gross revenue is the physical sale of produce — the trading side — and about 20% is commission and credit-facility income layered on top of that trade, per Entrackr. The more recent shift is a channel story rather than a geography one: the company’s traditional retailer and trader network has been supplemented, and in growth terms overtaken, by fulfilment work for quick-commerce apps, which Ninjacart says has been compounding at over 100% year-on-year through FY25 into FY26, according to its disclosures to Business Standard and Startuppedia. The surprise for a company built on kirana-store logistics is that its fastest-growing customer today is not a shopkeeper at all, but the dark-store network of an app promising ten-minute vegetable delivery.
The risks
Ninjacart’s business inherits the risks of the physical produce trade it sits inside, not just the risks of a typical software company. First, because it takes ownership of inventory rather than merely brokering it, it carries direct exposure to crop price swings, seasonal gluts and spoilage — a structurally thin-margin position that leaves little room for a bad harvest season or a logistics failure to be absorbed without hitting the bottom line. Second, regulatory exposure around agricultural trade — including how state APMC (mandi) rules and central policy on private agricultural trade evolve — can change the cost and legality of the model with limited notice, an industry-wide risk that agritech-sector analysis by Entrackr (July 2025) flags as a structural constraint on the whole category. Third, competitive intensity has only increased: Entrackr’s July 2025 sector report found that agritech has produced zero unicorns despite more than $2 billion raised industry-wide since 2020, and named several well-funded peers — Fraazo, Otipy, Deep Rooted and ReshaMandi — that shut down entirely in the same period on the back of capital constraints and unsustainable “farm-to-fork” economics. Ninjacart’s own pivot away from thin-margin trading lines in FY25 reads as a direct response to that same pressure, taken before it became existential.
The takeaway
Ninjacart’s most important decision was not any of its funding rounds — it was choosing, in FY25, to make its own revenue number look worse on purpose. Shutting down a low-margin trading line for the sake of a shot at real profitability is a hard sell to a market that treats top-line growth as the only proof of a startup’s health, and it is exactly the discipline that the agritech peers named in this piece — Fraazo, Otipy, Deep Rooted, ReshaMandi — did not have before they ran out of cash. The lesson for any inventory-heavy, thin-margin business is that survival sometimes means being willing to shrink faster than your competitors, rather than trying to outgrow a business model that cannot support the growth.
Frequently asked questions
Is Ninjacart a unicorn?
Not by confirmed figures. Its most reliably reported valuation is $815 million, set in January 2022 when Walmart and Flipkart led a $145 million round, and one tracker (Tracxn, via StartupTalky) later put it at roughly $756 million in May 2022. Both are below the $1 billion threshold that defines a unicorn, and the company has not disclosed a valuation for its 2026 fundraise.
How does Ninjacart actually make money?
Mostly by buying fresh produce from farmers and mandis and reselling it to retailers, traders and quick-commerce platforms at a markup, which made up about 80% of gross revenue in FY23 per Entrackr’s reporting; the remaining roughly 20% comes from commissions and credit facilities, not from a pure marketplace fee.
Why did Ninjacart’s revenue fall in FY25?
The company says it deliberately discontinued low-margin, non-core trading segments — reportedly including a lower-margin FMCG trading line — which cut reported revenue by roughly a fifth even as its net loss stayed close to flat at ₹256 crore, according to its FY25 disclosures reported by Business Standard and Startuppedia.
Who are Ninjacart’s biggest backers?
Tiger Global, Walmart and Flipkart, and Accel are the most significant. Tiger Global led the 2019 Series C that first made Ninjacart the best-funded company in Indian agritech; Walmart and Flipkart first invested in December 2019 and later led the $145 million round in December 2021; Accel has backed the company since its Series A and participated again in its 2026 pre-IPO raise alongside Nandan Nilekani.
Is Ninjacart planning an IPO?
The company has said it is targeting a public listing within roughly two years of its July 2026 fundraising announcement, alongside a claim of having reached EBITDA profitability, as reported by Entrackr. That target has not yet translated into a confirmed listing timeline or exchange filing.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr, “Ninjacart records Rs 967 Cr revenue in FY22, controls losses,” November 2022
- Entrackr, “Ninjacart’s gross revenue crosses Rs 1,600 Cr in FY23,” October 2023
- Entrackr, “Ninjacart claims Rs 2002 Cr in gross revenue for FY24,” October 2024
- Business Standard / PTI (via The Week), “Ninjacart posts Rs 256-cr loss in FY25, revenue drops to Rs 1,634 cr,” December 2025
- Startuppedia, “Bengaluru-Based B2B Agritech Platform Ninjacart Reports Rs 1,705 Crore Revenue in FY25; Loss at Rs 256 Crore,” April 2026
- Entrackr, “Ninjacart’s valuation crosses $815 Mn following Walmart and Flipkart-led round,” January 2022
- Entrackr, “Agritech startups account for only 2% of venture funding since 2020,” July 2025
- Entrackr, “Ninjacart raises $6 Mn after 4.5 years, claims EBITDA profitability ahead of IPO,” July 2026
- YourStory, “Tiger Global invests $100M into Ninjacart’s Series C round,” April 2019
- Entrackr, “NinjaCart receives $90 Mn in largest Indian bet by Tiger Global,” April 2019
- Entrackr, “Walmart and Flipkart invest in Ninjacart,” December 2019
- StartupTalky, “Ninjacart: India’s Largest Fresh Produce Supply Chain Platform,” company profile and funding history (accessed September 2026)
- The Ken, “Nimble Ninjacart vaults over India’s Covid-19 lockdown hurdles,” April 2020
- YourStory, “Agritech startup Ninjacart pivoted from B2C to B2B to solve inefficiencies,” September 2022
- Tracxn, Ninjacart company profile, funding and financials (accessed September 2026)
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