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Startup Deep Dive : Stellapps — the dairy-tech platform that had to start selling milk to survive

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Stellapps.

Stellapps spent its first six years selling dairy software and hardware to India’s milk industry and could not push revenue past a run rate of about $5 million, according to the venture fund that backed it. Its answer was not a better app: the Bengaluru company started manufacturing and selling milk products itself, a pivot that has since pushed its group revenue to a reported ₹359.1 crore ($37.4 million) in FY24, even as the IoT platform business that gave the company its name has shrunk to a small fraction of that number.

That gap between the well-known “dairy-tech” brand and what its own filings say the technology business actually earns is the story of Stellapps: an IIT Madras-incubated startup that digitised milk collection for a ₹5 lakh crore industry, then had to leave software economics behind and take on the capital intensity of a dairy company to keep growing.

Quick facts

Company Stellapps Technologies Private Limited
Founded Incorporated 20 April 2011, Bengaluru; incubated at IIT Madras’s Rural Technology & Business Incubator
Founder(s) Ranjith Mukundan, Ravishankar (Ravi) G Shiroor, Praveen Nale, Ramakrishna Adukuri and Venkatesh Seshasayee (all former Wipro colleagues)
Businesses SmartMoo dairy-IoT platform (herd monitoring, milk-quality testing, cold chain, ERP); MooMark contract dairy manufacturing; MooGrow farm inputs; MooPay farmer finance
Latest FY revenue ₹208.8 crore, group, FY25 (down 41.9% year-on-year), per Inc42 Datalabs; the parent technology entity alone declared ₹33.9 crore turnover for FY24 in its Registrar of Companies filing
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of ₹55.4 crore, group, FY25, per Inc42 Datalabs (MCA-sourced)
Listed Private; no IPO filed as of September 2026
Market value / last valuation Reported at roughly $57.6 million (about ₹494 crore) as of 6 January 2025, per Tracxn; not confirmed by the company
Key shareholders or CEO Ranjith Mukundan, co-founder and managing director; institutional funds hold roughly 75.9% of equity against founders’ 12.9%, per Tracxn’s latest shareholding data

What they do

Stellapps builds and sells an IoT and cloud platform, branded SmartMoo, that instruments India’s milk supply chain end to end: wearable sensors that track cattle health (mooON), automated milk collection units that test and log quality at village collection points (smartAMCU, smartCC), cold-chain temperature monitoring (ConTrak), and back-office software for procurement, payments and farm-input sales (mooOpt, mooFlowERP, mooPay). Its customers are dairy cooperatives and private processors, not individual farmers, who license the hardware and software to bring transparency and speed to a supply chain that has traditionally run on paper ledgers and manual testing. The company says its systems now touch more than 3.5 million registered farmers across roughly 42,000 villages and more than 250 dairy processors in 17 Indian states, monitoring in excess of 14 million litres of milk a day, figures the company has repeated consistently in press coverage between October 2024 and August 2025.

The origin

Stellapps began in 2011 as five Wipro colleagues in their late thirties and early forties looking for a problem to solve with the internet of things, then an emerging idea rather than an industry. Ranjith Mukundan, Ravishankar Shiroor and their co-founders were not looking at dairy specifically until a chance introduction: a friend’s uncle running an organic dairy farm near Bengaluru needed remote monitoring for his herd. The founders realised, as one of them later put it to Blume Ventures, that “a cow and a bus are the same, just the parameters to monitor change” — the sensing and telemetry problem was identical to the industrial IoT work they already knew, only the customer was different. India’s dairy sector, worth an estimated ₹5 lakh crore and the largest in the world by volume, still ran on trust, handwritten registers and manual fat-and-SNF testing at the point of milk collection. Mentors at IIT Madras’s incubation cell, where the company was later housed, pushed the founders to abandon a multi-sector IoT ambition and commit to dairy alone. The company needed about ₹1.25 crore to get started; ₹50 lakh of that came from IIT Madras as seed support, with the founders funding the rest by putting in 20 to 30% of their own salaries between November 2010 and October 2011 while still employed elsewhere.

The struggle years

The first pivot came within three years of founding. Between 2011 and 2014, Stellapps sold its sensors and automated milking equipment directly to farmers, the same model used by similar hardware ventures elsewhere. It did not work: individual smallholder farmers were not a customer base that could sustain a hardware and software business, since each farmer represented a tiny, price-sensitive ticket size with no reliable way to collect payment at scale. The company moved upstream, selling instead to the dairy cooperatives and processors who aggregated those farmers, and between 2014 and 2017 it signed on 50 to 60 dairy operators. But even with a business model that made more commercial sense, growth stayed shallow: by 2017, when Blume Ventures led a Series A round, Stellapps was running at a revenue rate of roughly $5 million a year and was margin-negative, according to Blume’s own account of the investment published in November 2023. Selling software and hardware into a fragmented, low-margin industry simply did not generate the kind of unit economics that could support a venture-scale business, and it took the company roughly five years after that Series A, until 2022, to turn its underlying unit economics positive at all. Investors who looked at the company in this period were, by Blume’s own description, sceptical that a technology company had any durable role to play in the milk business at all.

The turning point

The turning point was a decision, not an event: rather than keep trying to make software-only economics work in a low-margin, fragmented industry, Stellapps chose from 2017-18 onward to become a dairy company itself. It launched MooMark, initially selling raw milk out of tankers with no processing plant of its own, before leasing its first processing facility in Varanasi in 2023 and adding a second at Bidadi near Bengaluru, taking combined processing capacity to about 240,000 litres a day, per reporting in Business India in June 2025. The numbers on either side of that decision are stark. Before the pivot, in 2017, the technology-only business was running at roughly $5 million in annual revenue and losing money on every rupee of it, per Blume Ventures. By 2023, Blume said the combined group was running at a revenue rate of $70 million to $80 million, a roughly sixteen-fold increase from 2017 — though that figure is the venture fund’s own characterisation of the business’s trajectory rather than an audited number, and it should be read as directional rather than exact. What the RoC-filed and MCA-sourced numbers do confirm independently is that the group had scaled to reported revenue in the hundreds of crores by FY24 (see “The numbers” below) — a different order of magnitude from the technology-only business that struggled for its first six years.

The money behind it

Stellapps has raised money across roughly a decade and a half, moving from angel and grant support at IIT Madras to a late-stage venture and impact-investor cap table. Total funding is reported at $76 million across nine disclosed rounds as of 21 October 2024, per Inc42’s funding tracker; Tracxn’s independent count puts cumulative funding at $66.3 million across 14 rounds as of January 2025 — the two trackers disagree on how many undisclosed debt tranches and small venture rounds they count, so both figures are given here rather than one being presented as definitive.

On valuation, the two most recent independent estimates sit close together despite three years and a large jump in reported revenue passing between them: CB Insights put Stellapps at $52.18 million to $70.18 million around its October 2021 round, and Tracxn’s most recent estimate is about $57.6 million (roughly ₹494 crore) as of 6 January 2025 — a company-unconfirmed, third-party figure rather than a disclosed post-money valuation.

How it makes money

Stellapps now runs two economically different businesses under one name, and conflating them is the single most common error in how the company gets covered.

The numbers

Two fiscal years of group financials were verifiable from Inc42 Datalabs, which sources its numbers from Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings; a third, older year could not be independently confirmed and is not included rather than estimated. The parent technology entity’s own FY24 Registrar of Companies filing is shown separately, since it covers a narrower scope (see “How it makes money” above).

Fiscal year (₹ crore) Revenue Net profit/(loss) Scope / source
FY24 (year to 31 Mar 2024) 359.1 (27.6) Group, per Inc42 Datalabs (MCA-sourced)
FY25 (year to 31 Mar 2025) 208.8 (55.4) Group, per Inc42 Datalabs (MCA-sourced)
FY24 (year to 31 Mar 2024) 33.9 n/a (net worth ₹79.5 cr) Stellapps Technologies Pvt Ltd standalone, per its own RoC Annual Return (Form MGT-7), AGM held 30 September 2024

Where the money comes from

The risks

The takeaway

Stellapps’ history is a caution against assuming that solving a real, well-documented problem with good technology is enough to build a large business around it. The company spent six years proving that dairy cooperatives and processors would pay for better sensing, quality testing and traceability — and it still could not get past a $5 million revenue run rate doing only that. Its growth since 2020 has come from stepping off the software business it was built on and into the far more capital-intensive, lower-margin, more volatile business the technology was originally meant to merely observe. That trade is not obviously a win: the group’s revenue has since fallen by more than 40% in a single year and its losses have widened, even as its headline scale numbers look far larger than before. The transferable lesson is not “get closer to the physical supply chain,” it is that doing so changes what kind of company you are, with a different risk profile and a different set of numbers to be judged on — and that shift deserves as much scrutiny as the original technology idea did.

Frequently asked questions

What does Stellapps actually sell?

Two different things under one name: an IoT and software platform (SmartMoo) that dairy cooperatives and processors license to monitor cattle health, test milk quality and manage cold chains, and, separately, manufactured and private-label dairy products sold through its MooMark arm, which by 2025 accounted for the large majority of group revenue, per Business India’s June 2025 reporting.

Who founded Stellapps and when?

Stellapps was incorporated on 20 April 2011 in Bengaluru by five former Wipro colleagues — Ranjith Mukundan, Ravishankar (Ravi) G Shiroor, Praveen Nale, Ramakrishna Adukuri and Venkatesh Seshasayee — and was incubated at IIT Madras’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator, per the incubator’s own company listing and Tofler’s corporate records.

How much money has Stellapps raised, and from whom?

Trackers disagree on the exact cumulative figure: Inc42 reports $76 million across nine disclosed rounds as of October 2024, while Tracxn reports $66.3 million across 14 rounds as of January 2025. Backers across rounds have included Omnivore Partners, Blume Ventures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, IndusAge Partners, Qualcomm Ventures, Nutreco, IDH Farmfit Fund and, most recently, Miledeep Capital and the US International Development Finance Corporation as a debt lender.

Is Stellapps profitable?

No, based on the most recent MCA-sourced group figures compiled by Inc42 Datalabs: the group posted a net loss of ₹27.6 crore in FY24 and ₹55.4 crore in FY25, with revenue falling 41.9% between those two years.

Why do different sources report such different revenue figures for Stellapps?

Because they are describing different scopes. Group figures reported by Entrackr and Inc42 Datalabs (around ₹359-360 crore for FY24) include Stellapps’ MooMark dairy-manufacturing subsidiary, which the company itself says drives roughly 85% of group turnover. The parent technology entity, Stellapps Technologies Private Limited, reported standalone turnover of only ₹33.9 crore for the same year in its Registrar of Companies Annual Return.

Sources

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

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