Site icon The Invincible India

Startup Deep Dive : Two Brothers Organic Farms — Scaling organic food while losing Rs 18.4 crore a year

The Invincible India
The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Two Brothers Organic Farms.

Two brothers gave up a decade of banking salaries to farm a village they had left as boarding-school kids — and it took four straight years of losses before the soil, or the business, showed any sign of paying them back. Two Brothers Organic Farms now sells more than a hundred organic products in over 50 countries, but its most recent filed year still closed at a loss of ₹18.4 crore on ₹98.6 crore of revenue, a reminder that scaling an organic-food brand costs more than it earns, for now.

The Pune-based company, run under the entity TBOF Foods Private Limited, has raised institutional money from Zerodha’s Rainmatter, wealth manager 360 ONE Asset and actor-investor Akshay Kumar, among others, betting that a farm story rooted in one Maharashtra village can be built into a national and export-facing food brand before the losses catch up with it.

Quick facts

Company Two Brothers Organic Farms (legal entity: TBOF Foods Private Limited)
Founded 2014, on the founders’ ancestral farmland in Bhodani village, Indapur, Pune district; incorporated as TBOF Foods Private Limited on 22 March 2019
Founder(s) Satyajit Hange and Ajinkya Hange
Businesses Organic, farm-to-fork food products — A2 cultured ghee, cold-pressed oils, khapli wheat atta, jaggery, rice, pulses, snacks and condiments — sold direct-to-consumer, on marketplaces, quick commerce and exported to 50-plus countries
Latest FY revenue ₹98.6 crore in FY25 (2024-25), as per RoC filings (Inc42; TheCompanyCheck); the company told Entrackr in October 2025 that FY25 revenue was closer to ₹108 crore
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of ₹18.4 crore in FY25, per RoC filings (Inc42)
Listed Private — not listed on any stock exchange
Market value / last valuation Not disclosed by the company or investors as of its October 2025 Series B round (Tracxn)
Key shareholders Co-founders Satyajit and Ajinkya Hange; institutional and angel backers include Rainmatter (Zerodha’s investment arm), 360 ONE Asset, Narotam Sekhsaria Family Office, Rahul Garg of IGNITE Growth, and actor Akshay Kumar

What they do

Two Brothers Organic Farms makes and sells organic, chemical-free food: A2 cultured ghee, cold-pressed oils, khapli (emmer) wheat atta, rice, pulses, jaggery, honey, and a growing range of packaged snacks and condiments such as laddoos and tomato ketchup, spread across more than a hundred stock-keeping units (Local Samosa; The Locavore, September 2025). The customer is the health-conscious Indian household willing to pay a premium for certified-organic staples, reached through the company’s own website and app, e-commerce marketplaces, quick-commerce apps and modern retail, alongside a growing export business to the Indian diaspora and organic-food buyers in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East (Entrackr, October 2025; FreshPlaza, October 2025).

The origin

Satyajit Hange studied economics at Fergusson College and did an MBA at the University of Pune’s Department of Management Sciences; his younger brother Ajinkya took a computer science degree followed by an MBA from Indira College, Pune. Both spent close to a decade in banking, at institutions including Citibank, DBS, HDFC and HSBC, according to an account the brothers gave The Better India in December 2018. They had grown up splitting time between an English-medium boarding school in Pune and their family’s fields in Bhodani village, Indapur taluka, where their father farmed. Weekend visits home kept pulling them back, and what they saw troubled them: decades of chemical fertiliser use had left the family’s soil close to dead, even as it fed the loans that kept the farm afloat.

The founding insight came from an older generation of village farmworkers, who told the brothers that cow dung and cow urine, applied patiently, could rebuild soil health without a single bag of synthetic fertiliser. Around 2012, Satyajit and Ajinkya began stepping back from their banking careers to test that idea on two acres of family land, formally establishing Two Brothers Organic Farms in 2014 with a small herd of indigenous Gir cows and a handful of fruit and vegetable crops grown without chemical inputs (The Better India, December 2018; The Locavore, September 2025).

The struggle years

The transition did not pay for itself quickly. The Better India’s 2018 account describes “the first four years” after the switch as loss-making, as the brothers rebuilt soil fertility that decades of chemical farming had stripped away, a slow and expensive process of composting and crop diversification with no shortcut. Their own numbers make the point starkly: in year one, the farm’s total turnover was just ₹2 lakh.

The market made the early years harder still. When the brothers first tried to sell their chemical-free papayas to handcart vendors in Pune at ₹20 a kilogram, the vendors turned them away, dismissing the smaller, less uniform organic fruit as inferior next to glossier, chemically treated produce — until free samples proved the taste and quality (The Better India, December 2018). A second, more structural setback followed once they began selling in bulk: local mandi traders would not pay a premium for organic produce, effectively pricing it the same as conventional crops. That refusal to recognise the extra work behind an organic harvest pushed the brothers to abandon mandi trading altogether in 2016 and build their own retail relationships instead (The Locavore, September 2025).

The turning point

The 2016 decision to walk away from Pune’s wholesale mandis was the hinge the business turned on. Instead of accepting whatever price traders offered, the brothers started placing their fresh produce directly into supermarket chains across Maharashtra, and began turning surplus harvests into shelf-stable, value-added products such as ghee, jaggery and pickles rather than watching them rot or sell for a pittance (The Locavore, September 2025). Three years later, in 2019, they added a direct-to-consumer website, cutting out intermediaries on the retail side too.

The numbers either side of that shift are the clearest evidence of what it changed. Turnover had crawled to just ₹2 lakh in the farm’s first year; by the time the founders spoke to The Better India in December 2018, roughly two years into the retail pivot, monthly turnover had reached about ₹30 lakh — an annualised run rate of close to ₹3.6 crore. A business that traders had refused to pay a fair price for was, within a few years of controlling its own retail channel, growing at a pace no mandi stall could have delivered.

The money behind it

Institutional capital arrived only after the direct-to-consumer model had proven itself. Two Brothers Organic Farms has raised at least ₹182.7 crore in disclosed funding since 2023, across three rounds, on top of an earlier, undisclosed “first round” that Tracxn and Crunchbase date to February 2020:

What each backer changed, going by the companies’ own statements to the press: Akshay Kumar’s cheque bought early brand credibility and marketing reach at a stage when the company had almost no institutional backing; Rainmatter’s Series A funded the leap from a Maharashtra retail brand into US demand generation and a larger farmer network; and the 360 ONE-led Series B is meant to fund manufacturing capacity — including a planned food park — and a genuine push into overseas markets rather than opportunistic exports. No post-money valuation for any round has been disclosed by the company, its investors, or the data platforms that track it (Tracxn).

How it makes money

Two Brothers Organic Farms is a vertically integrated food company: it grows some of its own raw material on farms in Bhodani, sources the rest from a network of roughly 4,500 partner farmers organised across nine Farmer Producer Companies, and processes both into packaged products at its own facilities in Indapur and Aurangabad — including a 5,000-square-foot ghee unit turning out about 10,000 litres a day (The Locavore, September 2025). Money comes in from selling that finished, organic-certified output at a premium to conventional staples; money goes out on procurement from thousands of small farmers, processing infrastructure, quality control (a 12-person in-house lab, per The Locavore) and, increasingly, marketing spend to acquire customers on its own website, marketplaces and quick commerce.

No gross margin or take-rate figure has been published. What the filed numbers do show is that costs are currently outrunning sales: FY25 total expenses came to ₹122.9 crore against revenue of ₹98.6 crore, a 148% jump in expenses year-on-year even as revenue itself grew 156.9% (Inc42, FY25 filings). The part that is easy to miss from the outside is that an “organic premium” price does not automatically translate into a fat margin once a company owns its own processing plants, runs a 12-person quality lab, and trains tens of thousands of farmers rather than simply buying certified produce off a shelf — all costs the brothers have chosen to carry themselves rather than outsource.

The numbers

Two Brothers Organic Farms, via its TBOF Foods Private Limited entity, has only two fiscal years of revenue and profit-or-loss data in the public domain; RoC-filing-based platforms and the company’s own disclosures do not go back further than FY24, so this table does not stretch to the usual three or four years.

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Net profit / (loss) (₹ crore)
FY24 (2023-24) 38.4 Not disclosed
FY25 (2024-25) 98.6 (company told Entrackr the figure was closer to 108) (18.4)

Where the money comes from

The clearest split the company has disclosed is by sales channel and by geography, both as of its October 2025 Series B announcement:

The surprise is less any single channel than the mix: a food brand that started out selling papayas from a two-acre plot now earns roughly a fifth of its revenue outside India, a share that rivals what it earns from marketplaces and quick commerce put together inside the country. The company’s own percentages, as given to Entrackr, add up to slightly over 100%, which points to rounding in how the founders described the split rather than a precise, audited breakdown — a reminder that channel-mix numbers here are company-stated, not filed.

The risks

The takeaway

The lesson in Two Brothers Organic Farms is less about organic food than about sequencing. The brothers spent four unpaid years rebuilding soil and trust — proving to sceptical mandi traders and handcart vendors, one free sample at a time, that a smaller, uglier tomato could still be a better one — before they ever asked an investor for money. That patient, unglamorous repair work became the story that Rainmatter, Akshay Kumar and 360 ONE Asset eventually backed. The losses showing up now, in FY25’s filings, are not a sign the founding idea failed; they are the ordinary cost of the next, harder problem — building processing plants, a quality lab and export logistics fast enough to keep pace with demand the first decade earned. Fixing the supply before chasing the demand is the transferable part; the money, when it came, came after.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Two Brothers Organic Farms?

Satyajit and Ajinkya Hange, brothers who left careers in multinational banking to return to their family’s farmland in Bhodani village, Indapur, near Pune, formally establishing the business in 2014 (The Better India, December 2018).

Is Two Brothers Organic Farms profitable?

No. Its FY25 (2024-25) filings show a net loss of ₹18.4 crore on revenue of ₹98.6 crore, even as revenue grew 156.9% year-on-year (Inc42, FY25 filings).

How much funding has Two Brothers Organic Farms raised?

At least ₹182.7 crore in disclosed funding since April 2023, across a pre-Series A round backed by Akshay Kumar, a June 2024 Series A led by Rainmatter, and an October 2025 Series B led by 360 ONE Asset, on top of an earlier undisclosed 2020 round (Entrackr, October 2025; Indian Retailer, June 2024; Tracxn).

What does Two Brothers Organic Farms sell?

Organic, chemical-free food products including A2 cultured ghee, cold-pressed oils, khapli wheat atta, rice, pulses, jaggery and packaged snacks, sold direct to consumers, through marketplaces and quick commerce in India, and exported to more than 50 countries (Local Samosa; Entrackr, October 2025).

Is Two Brothers Organic Farms a listed company?

No. It is privately held, with no disclosed valuation as of its October 2025 Series B round; there is no public market capitalisation to report (Tracxn).

Sources

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

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.

Exit mobile version