Today, while agriculture is one of the main sources of livelihood for about 58 percent of India’s population, Indian farmers have little to no options to pick their markets and buyers for their produce. While there are numerous challenges that farmers come across on a day-to-day basis, what majorly affects their condition is lack of visibility and lack of on-time connection to bulk buyers, this lack of connection from farmer to end buyer or bulk buyers shifts a major portion of margin to middlemen.

At Crophunt we are bridging this gap by connecting all the stakeholders with each other and specifically farmers to interstate and intrastate bulk buyers. Set up with a vision to bridge this information and real time connectivity gap between producer and buyer is Crophunt Agritech Pvt Ltd., an F2B Agri Commodity platform that not only connects farmers, vendors, wholesalers, traders of one state with the vendors, traders, retailers and exporter of the same state but also with other states. Brainchild of Nishant Dubey and futher strengthen by cofounders Dr. Narendra Kumar Kulshreshtha, Tanuj Sabharwal, Shashwat Tripathi and Shekhar Rana.

Crophunt holds the vision ‘To enrich the life of farmers and contribute in sustainable development of food production’ through tech enabled supply chain and information flow. Keeping up with this ideology, Nishant Dubey, Founder, Crophunt says, “With the fragmentations in India's Agri commodity market, farmers, vendors and traders in a rich produce states find it hard to sell their products on a better price while the vendors, traders, retailers and exporter sitting in some other state and also within the same state face the difficulty in finding the right Agri commodity supplier.

As a result, they end up buying products at a much higher price. There is an immense supply demand gap that every year results in loss of cultivated crops, margin to farmers as well as money.

With Crophunt Agritech, we aspired to bring a system of information flow in both directions from farmers to buyers end and towards the farmers as well. We noticed the various fluctuations in the agri commodity markets is mainly due to the crop diversity among various states of our country, different states have different soil condition which favours a very high yield of certain crops, then it becomes very obvious that the price for that commodity in that area will be low compared to other areas where the production of that particular crop is low but still demand is there in the market. With Crophunt Agritech, we are matching this supply and demand in various states through our network of FPOs, Farmers and bulk buyers. This is helping us to secure higher margins for farmers and a better pricing for our buyers, creating a win-win situation for all the parties connected.

Linking Small Farmers to Bigger Markets
India's agriculture sector is undoubtedly advancing slowly yet steadily towards its digital transformation. And cashing

on these opportunities is the current startup ecosystem which is playing a critical role here by bringing innovation and disruption in much-needed areas. With Crophunt Agritech, Farmers and Agri-sellers can now sell faster with more profitability and buyers can purchase the sold commodities at a reliable price by easily avoiding artificial price fluctuation.

“At Crophunt Agritech platform, we allow farmers to upload and market their product’s details through our tech platform, in many cases we also procure agri commodities and secure orders for seller partners aka Farmers and FPOs, keeping their payment safe while ensuring QA and a smooth logistics for our buyers. This way, What we promise to the farmers and the buyers is a unique marketing platform and from farmers standpoint they just have to upload the product details, then we will market it and sell it. This allows the farmers to be virtually visible at multiple places to sell the products”, elaborates Nishant.

Operating as consultants, Crophunt Agritech is also empowering the farmers regarding the situation in the market by conducting programs with farmers and farmers producers, organizations and more. Educating farmers producers organizations allows Crophunt to indirectly reach out to more farmers as these organizations further connect with more farmers. “We have also recently trained 400 plus farmers regarding the use of our technology and its subsequent benefit and how they can market their products from the comfort of their home. These farmers don’t have any platform where they can actually do the marketing of their products.

So, if you are not able to market yourself, then you won’t be able to sell you products. This is why we created our platform and through this, we have been able to help such farmers. Owing to our hardcore sales and marketing platform, we are able to connect the farmers with the buyers and within a month alone we have secured orders worth in crores. We will further strengthen our technology, infrastructure our reach to farmers base, we are committed to create a digital agri commerce infrastructure for the farmers of our nation”, speaks Nishant Dubey.

Leading the League to Empower Farmers
Nishant recalls the initial challenges of the firm being convincing the farmers and making their community aware of the technology and gaining their trust which is still a very difficult process but gradually more number of farmers have started to opt to technology. However, with their founding team of industry veterans, Crophunt Agritech is overcoming all the stumbling blocks. Today, Crophunt Agritech is marching ahead with a mission to improve Agri-supply chain and increase farmer's income by connecting Farmers, Traders, Wholesalers, Retailers and Businesses with each other with the help of technology and innovation.

With Crophunt Agritech, farmers and agri-sellers can now sell faster with more profitability and buyers can purchase the sold commodities at a reliable price by easily avoiding artificial price fluctuation

Witnessing a positive growth curve in terms of users as well as results, Crophunt currently boasts of 10,000 farmers who are associated with them directly and over 100 FPOs that have approached Crophunt to be a part of the firm whereas serving as much as 20 FPOs. “If we onboard 100 FPOs, then we will be associated with more than one lakh farmers. It is because we were able to help one FPO, today a lot of other FPOs also want to be associated with us,” says Nishant Dubey.
With the launch of new technologies, Crophunt Agritech is looking forward to adopting Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Technology and Blockchain to achieve better outcomes.

In the next year or two, the cofounders of company Tanuj, Shashwat and Shekhar also aspire to make the entire operations from farmer to the end consumer transparent. “We as a company are directly approaching the farmers as of now but we are also trying to approach the head of these farmers and as I mentioned before, these are farmers’ producers’ organizations and these organizations are very much interested in leveraging new technologies.

So, we keep approaching such people to get the farmers on board. We are constantly striving to gain the trust of the farmers. We are also launching a new app shortly which will help the farmers with the consultancy services as well”, concludes Nishant.