Gramophone, an agro-tech startup co-founded by IIM-A & IIT-M graduates, Tauseef Ahmad Khan, Nishant Mahatre, Harshit Gupta and Ashish Rajan Singh, has catered to over 8.5 lakh farmers, received over 1 million calls on their toll-free number and their multilingual app has been installed 2 lakh times. The Indore-headquartered company currently has a presence in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, and plans to enter Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu soon.
Agstack Technologies Pvt. Ltd., which does business as Gramophone, earned Rs.48 crore in financial year ended March 31, 2021. The company has in its five years of existence raised a total of $20 million from investors.
For centuries, the farmers in India have been relying on traditional methods, local market dynamics and increasing weather unpredictability. The cost of cultivation has risen consistently over the years, which has hit their pockets massively. Like every other sector in India, farming also needs innovative technology solutions to enhance productivity. To tackle such issues and seeing an opportunity, an Indore-based agro-tech startup called Gramophone started working to provide a solution to farmers that would help them.
Launched in 2016, Gramophone strives to create a difference in farming by building an intelligent farming platform that provides farmers crop advisory, agronomy advice, dynamic weather and price updates, learnings on crop diseases, and recommendations on agro inputs and machinery to help them plan their sowing and harvesting cycle better and leading to higher yields. Now a farmer can buy agro inputs, get access to knowledge and sell the produce on a single platform. The full-stack approach makes their life better.
The farmers just have to key in basic information like crop type, date of sowing, and the size of farmland for Gramophone to throw up actionable insights on crop and soil.
Gramophone has built three components, which streamline the farming process. These are:
Gram Salah for farm management and providing personalised “agronomic intelligence”
Gram Uday for providing farmers access to agricultural inputs via use of technology, and
Gram Vyapar, which brings traders, commission agents and processors on the same platform.
Gramophone is currently working with 150+ brands in agro-input commerce and hosts an entire range of products that farmers need in crop production. It has tied up with Godrej Agrovet and Dhanuka on the crop protection side and with Rasi and Nunhems for seeds.
Gramophone’s end-to-end tech solutions and farmer-centric approach have made lakhs of farmers save more, grow better in the last five years. Even before sowing, the team works with them on their farm’s soil health, by providing soil testing reports and a personalised crop calendar prepared by their experienced agro-experts. Gramophone has an experienced team of more than 350 agro-experts, spread across Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
The startup has also added certain other services like an ‘Amazon Prime’ for agricultural inputs like pesticides, fertilizers, seeds and other products for soil nutrition. They also conduct online classes, where farmers get to sit down with an agricultural scientist every fortnight.