Accelerating the growth curve of global Agri players with our Advisory & Tech

By Naveen L

When Ninjacart was founded in 2015, our value proposition was a lot different than what it is today. The company was fairly local, conceptualized and operating in Bangalore as a hyperlocal B2C delivery service. With the budding market getting saturated and upon realizing that the actual problem lies elsewhere, the founders were quick to pivot – to become a Supply chain company that solves complex on-ground problems and empowers a cluster of stakeholders such as farmers, aggregators, retailers and end consumers.

This decision was a game changer for the company as it paved the way for us to become India’s largest Agri-tech company. The Indian Agri economy is a $500 billion industry and yet even with our resounding success, Ninjacart has managed to create only a 0.2% impact on this vast canvas. Today with our core Agri output business being profitable, we have our mission realigned – to increase our impact on the entire Agri ecosystem in India by 2025. And in doing so, we have also redefined our vision – to help create more Ninjacarts of the world and foster a long-lasting impact on the global Agri industry.   

We started Ninja Tech Ventures in 2021 with the intent of partnering with like minded entrepreneurs across other global emerging markets and helping them in their journey of building a successful farm to fork business in their respective countries. It was an initiative that was spun purely by chance, when startups from all across the globe started to reach out to us, seeking our support & guidance and trying to resonate with our journey. And we happily obliged.

Within the first few conversations, we realized the true potential that such collaborations can hold. A typical problem that founders often dealt with was in identifying the right blueprint for building this kind of business and to be able to do it at scale. As we have spoken about in our prior blog, there are no precedents in this space. At Ninjacart, we had to build this business right from scratch and in doing so we’ve made our share of mistakes. But most importantly, we have learnt from our mistakes and we have continually evolved, solving one problem at a time. Ninjacart started their journey, at a time when the area of Fruits and Vegetables (or as we say perishables) supply chain was an untapped, non-tech avenue. And today we are Asia’s largest Agtech company. It took us 7 years to get to where we are. But do others need to spend that amount of time? – Not necessarily!

This led to the inception of Ninja Tech Ventures, a spin off of our Ninja Ventures initiative – where we offer Agri-tech players across the globe, our state-of-the-art Supply chain technology. Coupled with our Consulting & Advisory services, we enable startups to shorten their learning curve and fast-track their growth trajectory. Typically this is a four point process.

Under Ninja Tech Ventures, we offer start-ups our:

• Executive Sponsorship: we are committed as a result driven technology partner, striving to deliver an end-to-end Supply chain platform and associated modules in a rapidly changing technology space. We are willing to take a bet on budding entrepreneurs who are keen on driving change in their respective geographies.
• Strategic Tech Investment: we come with our investment, which is in the form of our technology. We wish to give startups the much needed boost to scale up their business and operations. We have spent a significant amount of capital to build this robust and modular technology stack, which startups can now utilize for a fraction of the cost.
• Leveraged Expertise: we have built and fine tuned our SCM platform for over 7 years and we shall leverage our strong team of expert technologists and SMEs for each of our partners. People who are well versed in building optimized supply chain ecosystems from the ground up.
• Knowledge & Skillshare: we bring in all the learnings and best practices from our experience in a diverse & unorganized market such as India. We strongly believe in creating solutions that are beneficial to businesses and the society.

Our technology is tailor-made for Agriculture, designed to cater to the dynamics of any emerging, unregulated economy. When we began our journey in 2015, there were no solutions in the market that could fit our exact needs. So we built everything ourselves, inhouse. And as we did, now there is no need to reinvent the wheel. For us, each partner engagement is a dedicated project, where the design thinking outlook is always encouraged. Our technology being modular in nature, can comfortably fit in the partner’s ecosystem and accommodate their current tech landscape and business process frameworks. If the partner has some existing tech framework or modules built in, our technology stack with its various modules, can be customized to fill in the gaps and provide a comprehensive coverage of all Supply chain touchpoints. With Ninjacart, our partners can have a proven and viable MVP within 9 months or less, without the tech and opportunity cost overheads.

A partnership with Ninjacart is not like that of a traditional software vendor relationship. It is a partnership of equals. As with our technology, also comes our Consulting & Advisory services, which helps our partners in making the right decisions at the right time. Some examples can be – deciding on when to invest in automation, devising the right kind of organizational and people structure, cultivating the right skill sets, identifying the right metrics that drive profitability, evaluating the ideal supply chain configuration for your tonnage i.e. push based vs pull based, asset light vs asset heavy, outsourcing logistics vs owning a fleet in house, designing warehouse layouts, expansion into other towns & cities, planning for the sales and demand forecasts, and many more. We shall be with you, every step of the way.

Interested to join us?

With our increasing global community of Agri-startups and partners, we are making our technology, knowledge & experience open to all. And we have started to see fruition of our endeavor in the Latin America and South East Asia regions. To know more, write to us at partnerships@ninjacart.com or come visit our page.