India's coolest start-ups: How AI-powered SaaS platform Fasal disrupted India's horticulture space

Fasal

(AI-powered IoT-SaaS platform for horticulture)

Key People: Shailendra Tiwari, Founder/CEO; Ananda Verma, Founder

Key investors: It has 19 institutional investors, including Omnivore, Location Labs, and Wavemaker Partners

Funding: Fasal has raised total funding of $19.42 million till date

What makes it cool: Even though it is a tech company at its core, it sees itself as the inventor of an essential language between the farmer and the crop

A failed attempt at growing coloured capsicum started it all. Shailendra Tiwari and Ananda Verma, engineers by training, were colleagues at a tech firm in Bengaluru when they started it as a hobby. “Our idea was to learn about farming and maybe sell our produce,” says Tiwari, who comes from a farming family in Varanasi. “But when the capsicum turned out to be full of spots and smaller in size, we were intrigued as we knew the science behind it but there was something we weren’t doing right.”

The setback hurt as the techies from Uttar Pradesh thought they knew farming—both come from agricultural families (Verma’s family has a legacy in cauliflower seed production in Azamgarh). This spurred a deep dive into farming over the next one and a half years. Along the way they realised that agriculture, spanning an estimated 120-150 million hectares in India, presented a big opportunity. “Despite India’s expansive land, the agricultural export numbers are dwarfed by the Netherlands, a country with only one million hectares in horticulture,” says Tiwari. What farmers needed was knowledge and tools. The duo ditched their jobs and Fasal, a full-stack agritech solution provider, was born in 2018. In FY22, it posted revenues of `5.5 crore, per Tracxn.

Focussing on the horticulture sector—fruits, vegetables, plantation crops, and spices—data is collected from various sources and then analysed by a team including agronomists and plant pathologists. It then leverages technology to provide crop- and crop stage specific insights to farmers. And its B2B arm helps farmers sell fresh produce. Today, Fasal is present in 13+ states and works as a virtual doctor for more than 15 crops over 75,000+ acres. It has also cut down 56,000 metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.