Introduction
“ Empowering farmers with the equipment.”
Gold Farm, an Agritech startup company, is a mobile app for booking tractors a perfect platform for farmers in India. It even provides solar water pumps for agriculturalist farming in power shortfall regions in India.
The Agri startup company collaborated with the local people and started a network of booking agents, having good knowledge of using a smartphone and online transactions. Through the call service and mobile application, Gold Farm provides an opportunity door to the farmers booking farm equipment.
Through its mobile application and call service, the startup provides an easy way to book farm equipment. The team collaborated with the local people and created a network of booking agents, who knew about using a smartphone and carrying out online transactions. They helped the farming community to get access to the mobile app. At present, they run over 250 booking agents and 500 tractor owners connected with the mobile app.
The company also works closely with the government and farm equipment manufacturers to make farm mechanization affordable to small and marginal farmers.
Vision & Mission
Gold Farm aims to enhance the growth and sustainability of farmers by structuring productive ecosystems through innovation and technology. It likes to double the farm income for a million farmers by 2022 in India.
Founders and Inception
Abhilash Thirupathy and Karthic Ravindranath co-founded Gold Farm agri company in 2013. Headquartered in Bangalore, India. They have offices in Bangalore, Kolar, Hubli, Trichy and Coimbatore with 100 plus employees across these locations.
Snippets about the Agripreneurs
Abhilash Thirupathy is a serial entrepreneur, co-founded Surya Power Magic with his childhood friend Karthic Ravindranath in 2012 involving in solar pump irrigation before starting Gold Farm.
Why Gold Farm?
Being raised in an agricultural family, Abhilash had a good knowledge and can understand the challenges and cons in this sector. The duo feels that lack of proper heed and facilities they think that farmers are moving out due to lack of empowerment and hardships involved in it.
The idea to start the agri tech company came into limelight during the venture of a new business model in 2012-13, in the form of Ola and Uber. Abhilash and Karthic wanted to test the similar approach and making it possible in agriculture space
With the help of Solar Power Magic, Gold Farm used to provide irrigation facilities to the farmers and also educated them about the rainwater harvesting.
Confrontations
Capital and Team building is the biggest challenge faced by them. The hardest part was continually traveling between farms and city for Abhilash and Karthic. Many investors backed the idea of funding into their venture because of droughts and unsupportive climatic conditions and farmers suicide. The perception of agri startup changed the outlook among people especially investors when Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, decided to include agri-startups and policies related to agriculture.
Business Model
Gold Farm is based on Farming as a Service(FaaS) model, aiming to provide farmers a way to book any farm equipment as per their requirement through just a click on the app or through a call service.
With the use of the credit system they wanted to build a strong relationship with the farmers to provide more facilities and supplies for the development of agriculture.
Funding And Revenue
Like every start-up, they began with a small amount, and their initial funding happened from family, friends and with a few backers as investors.
In 2017, Automobile manufacturer Mahindra & Mahindra and Infuse Ventures funded Rs 13 crore to the company. Intellecap is the other investor for the Agri tech company. The annual revenue of Gold Farm is $4 million.
Competitors
- AgroIn
- Kheyti
- Oxen Farm
- Trringo
- EM3 Agri Services
- Strider
- Solinftec
- Farmshots
AgroIn is the biggest competitor to the Farm Gold.
Bottomline
Gold Farm plans to expand their venture in Bangladesh and other 8 states in India which presently runs in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Today, Gold Farm has transformed 7,500 hectares of barren land and 25,000 hectares of land been ploughed and harvested in Kolar and Chikbellappur districts.
