How Agribazaar is helping farmers reduce dependence on middlemen and moneylenders

At a mandi in Alwar, Rajasthan, a farmer with a cart full of mustard faces a familiar trap. Prices are falling by the minute.

There’s nowhere safe to store his crop, no reliable way to know the true price, and no patient lender waiting in the wings. He can either sell at a throwaway rate or borrow from a moneylender at crushing interest.

This everyday crisis is the starting point for Agribazaar, the agri-tech platform born from Amith Agarwal’s two-decade journey through India’s commodity and warehousing ecosystem.

After graduating in 2001, Amith followed the conventional finance path – corporate roles, stable career – before being pulled towards agriculture. He spent years on the ground in Rajasthan, learning how the system really worked: fragmented warehouses, limited formal credit, and farmers permanently at the mercy of timing and intermediaries.

With a small founding team, modest capital, and no safety net, Amith and his co-founders began by building a physical backbone – leasing warehouses instead of buying them, reinvesting every rupee into operations, and focusing on trust in a sector where defaults and disputes were the norm.

Their first branch manager earned Rs 7,000 per month; years later, he manages half of Rajasthan. For Amith, loyalty is part of the balance sheet.

In 2014, the startup secured investment from Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign fund, a turning point that gave it fuel to expand. As the Indian government pushed for digital adoption, the team saw an opportunity to layer technology on top of this hard-won physical network.

In 2016, they launched Agribazaar, an online marketplace connecting farmers, cooperatives, traders, and institutional buyers. Over time, they added formal financing for farmers through Agriwise Finserv, an RBI-approved NBFC, and built AI-driven satellite mapping to help with cropping and risk assessment.

The goal: one integrated ecosystem linking storage, price discovery, finance, and trading.

The journey hasn’t been smooth. Experiments with external management taught the founders a hard lesson – culture cannot be outsourced. They returned to the front lines, promoted leaders who had grown with the company, and rebuilt alignment from within. Competition from other agri-fintech platforms has intensified, and operational risks – from weather shocks to logistics – remain ever-present.

Yet the core thesis has stayed the same: if you serve the agricultural community well, you are serving the nation. Agribazaar is trying to turn what was once a fragmented, opaque chain into reliable rails on which India’s rural economy can run.

How far can a founder-led, capital-efficient approach go in a sector this vast? Can a private platform become critical infrastructure for India’s food system without losing its discipline?

The full story of Agribazaar’s evolution, governance, and next bets is covered in The Indian Dream – 3rd Edition.

Read the complete piece in the Agritech section on IndianDream.club.