Bengaluru-based digital ag platform BigHaat is planning an aggressive expansion in its home market and moves into Africa and Southeast Asia in a bid to generate annual revenues of $1 billion within five years.
Founded in 2015 by Sateesh Nukala and Sachin Nandwana, BigHaat began as an online marketplace enabling farmers to purchase inputs from fertilizer to farm machinery. It has since evolved to become what Nukala claims is “India’s largest farmer engagement network” with “nearly 3 million monthly active farmers.”
The firm, which has just raised $10 million in a round led by Bidra (the VC arm of fertilizer giant OCP Group) and supported by JM Financial and Ashish Kacholia, is “close to EBITDA breakeven,” Nukala tells AgFunderNews.
“With continued growth, BigHaat expects to reach full profitability by 2026.”
He adds: “BigHaat positions itself as one of the most capital-efficient agri-tech companies in India, having scaled to approximately ₹1,100 crore [$121 million] in revenue with about ₹200 crore [$22 million] of capital raised prior to the latest funding round.”
Moving forward, he says, “BigHaat plans to scale both its input and market linkage businesses in India, while expanding into key markets in Africa and Southeast Asia. Alongside this, the company is scaling its data monetization initiatives, which are expected to drive revenue growth and profitability.”
Structural tailwinds
According to Nukala, BigHaat’s growth is being driven by two key “structural tailwinds.” First: food safety, sustainability, and traceability are becoming core requirements for large food companies; and second: digital adoption is increasing across rural India.
According to Nukala, farmer acquisition on BigHaat is now driven almost entirely through digital and social media outreach, with word-of-mouth referrals also growing, enabling BigHaat to expand its user base without relying on pricy offline recruitment.
The fact that farmers are increasingly focusing on higher-value crops and improved yields, meanwhile, is also driving growth in both farmer engagement and input sales on the platform, he claims.
“As global demand for traceable and food-safe produce rises, the platform is expanding rapidly in terms of farmer base, acreage, and crop coverage.”
Looking ahead, he says, BigHaat sees additional margin expansion through international market entry and monetizing its ag data platform. “The initial focus will be on key markets in Africa, starting with spices. We expect this expansion to contribute meaningfully to revenue growth over the coming years.”
Bidra: BigHaat is trusted, scalable, and highly capital-efficient
For Bidra, the investment thesis for BigHaat is clear, CEO Yassine Cherkaoui tells AgFunderNews.
“BigHaat has built one of the most trusted and scalable farmer-facing platforms in Indian agriculture… What initially stood out was BigHaat’s ability to solve a very real problem for farmers by providing reliable access to quality inputs with transparency and convenience.”
But over time, the company has evolved into something much more comprehensive, he says. “BigHaat’s backwards integration model is an exceptionally effective way to build durable connectivity across the agri value chain, linking brands and distributors directly to the farmer.
“What impressed us most is that the team has executed this strategy in a highly capital-efficient manner while still achieving meaningful pan-India scale.”
The evolution of BigHaat:
What started as an online marketplace to buy ag inputs is now a “full-stack agri value chain platform with a strategy that starts at the pre-harvest stage and extends all the way to market linkages,” claims cofounder and CEO Sateesh Nukala.
On the pre-harvest side, BigHaat runs a pan-India digital marketplace for farm inputs, offering products from 400+ brands across 10,000 SKUs.
On the post-harvest side, it is building an integrated sourcing and supply business across spices, grains, and pulses, enabling farmers to connect with and sell to institutional buyers of fully-traceable grains, pulses and spices in India and beyond via its AgroHaat platform.
“The company first built deep farmer relationships through quality inputs and data-driven advisory and then expanded into post-harvest procurement and institutional supply,” says Nukala.
With almost 3 million monthly active farmers now using the platform, BigHaat now sits “among a small group of agtech platforms globally that combine reach, depth of interaction, and transaction capability.”
Underpinning everything is BigHaat’s free, data-driven crop advisory service, which processes over one million farm-level data records daily, creating one of the largest proprietary agricultural datasets in the industry, he explains.
“The data layer also powers monetization through brand and product discovery for input companies and is expected to unlock new opportunities with adjacent stakeholders such as financial institutions and rural service providers. As a result, BigHaat is increasingly positioning itself as a last-mile digital connectivity platform for rural India.”
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