NINJACART

ABOUT US:
We are pioneers in the tech-driven supply chain space for fresh produce.

Agritech startup Ninjacart was started to organise the agri ecosystem in India
through technology and data. The idea was to solve and improve the lives of millions
of agri players involved in the agri value chain or agri ecosystem, which includes
farmers, wholesalers, resellers, retailers, aggregators, and supply chain players. The
Bengaluru-based startup was founded by Thirukumaran Nagarajan, Kartheeswaran
Kandasamy, Vasudevan Chinnathambi, and Sharath Loganathan in June 2015.
JOURNEY FROM B2C TO B2B:
Ninjacart initially started with a B2C model to transport fruits and vegetables from
retail outlets to consumers in under 60 minutes. “We encountered numerous
grievances on delayed deliveries from retail outlets, kirana stores, and small
businesses,” says Kartheeswaran.
The presence of middlemen resulted in farmer exploitation, forcing them to sell their
produce at lower rates. This meant that farmers were experiencing unfair practices, a
high food wastage due to supply-demand mismatch and lower income. Also, due to
lack of transparency and the absence of specialised equipment, there were issues
such as delayed deliveries as well as undersupply of fresh produce to retail outlets.
This made the founders pivot to a B2B model in September 2015 to solve “one of the
toughest agricultural supply chain problems”, build a reliable, cost-efficient, and high-
speed infrastructure, and enable retailers and merchants to purchase fresh produce
directly from farmers daily, says Kartheeswaran.
“Switching from a B2C to a B2B business model was a difficult decision. However, inefficiencies in
the food supply chain prompted us to take such drastic measures,” he says. From farmers and retailers
to end-users, Ninjacart identified issues at every stage and took the initiative to standardise the food
supply chain in India. “It took us a year to get to a point where we can say that Ninjacart business
model is self-sufficient, tech-enabled, and cost-effective,” says Kartheeswaran. He says, now
Ninjacart has successfully replaced middlemen with technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI),
machine learning (ML), data science, and app-based platforms.

Supply Chain and Tech:

Ninjacart is India's largest fresh produce supply chain company that is solving one of
the toughest problems in the world through technology. We connect producers of
food directly with retailers, restaurants, and service providers using in-house
applications that drive end to end operations. Currently, our Supply Chain is
equipped to move 1400 tonnes of perishables from farms to businesses, every day,
in less than 12 hours.
THE PROBLEM:
1. Farmers experience price risk, information asymmetry about demand, distribution
inefficiency, and receive late payments.
2. Retailers face problems like higher costs, low quality and unhygienic produce, high
price volatility, and the everyday hassle of going to the market.
3. The traditional Supply Chain is highly inefficient, unorganized, and has a high rate of
food wastage.

OUR SOLUTION:

1. We eliminate intermediaries by taking control of the Supply Chain by using

technology and analytics.
2. We build reliable, cost-effective, and high-speed logistics and infrastructure to
solve for inefficiencies in the Supply Chain.
3. On one end, farmers get better prices and consistent demand, and on the
other end, retailers receive fresh produce at competitive prices that are
delivered to their doorstep.

CHALLENGES:
While the Bengaluru-based startup was one of the first in the Indian agritech space
to identify the pain points of the supply chain, this meant there were many
challenges it had to deal with. According to Kartheeswaran, the most difficult task
was to identify the price at which farmers sell fresh vegetables to the middlemen.
Furthermore, farmers are uninformed of the demand conditions, resulting in
considerable losses. “We had to tackle two main obstacles, i.e., convincing retailers
and grocery store owners to take their operations online, and convincing farmers to
trust us over the conventional intermediary they had known for years,” he adds. 
After nearly a year of running the tech-enabled infrastructure, Ninjacart’s B2B model
began to thrive, and “we knew we had produced something significant,” he says.

USP AND PLANS AHEAD:

In addition to reducing the time it takes for the produce to travel from farm to store, Ninjacart
founder says the company has increased farmers’ earnings and living standards. The team now
delivers fresh vegetables and fruits from farmers to retailers and other businesses in less than 12
hours. “We made Ninjacart what it is today by investing in technology and data science, and we will
continue to do so in the future,” says Kartheeswaran. Farmers gain insight into market demand and
supply of produce through our services. In order to ensure that delivery drivers make no unnecessary
trips and are always available for deliveries, data is used to figure out the logistics of delivery.
Retailers receive fresh produce delivered right to their doors along with secure payments and online
 inventory. In March this year, the startup launched a $25 million Agri Seed Fund to support emerging
and new-age startups in the agri sector. “We want to invest in startups, entrepreneurs, and tech
innovators who present unique, sustainable, and tech-enabled solutions. Our major focus is to
accelerate the advancement of the agricultural landscape and ideas that are involved in the agri and
agri-allied industries with a focus on fintech, commerce, and digitisation,” says Kartheeswaran.
Ninjacart also acquired SaaS platform Tecxprt in March this year to strengthen its position as a one-
stop solution for agri-players. In April, it partnered with Avanti Finance to provide easy access to
credit products. Ninjacart increased its capabilities inside the agritech area advocating digital financial
inclusiveness, with an aim to assist agri-traders by offering quick financing at a fair cost, relieving
their financial challenges. In May this year, Ninjacart invested in Fyllo, a Bengaluru-based agritech
startup. “In future, Ninjacart will keep adding value to the agrispace and will continue to innovate in
order to enable and empower agri participants. We will keep progressing in the direction of benefiting
the agriculture sector in India,” says Kartheeswaran. “Ninjacart's goal is to streamline the entire agri
ecosystem so that all agri-players along the food supply chain can take full advantage of the
infrastructure,” he adds.

GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT: We move We source

fresh produce from
We work everyday,
Indian Villages
with pan India
farmers
We supply
fresh
produce to
retailers We work with
farmers

THE ROAD AHEAD:

Our vision is to build India's most efficient and largest Supply Chain platform and
improve the lives of producers, businesses, and consumers in a meaningful manner.
We are focused on making the Ninjacart innovation more accessible to the most
fragmented parts of society. We intend to leverage our strengths and resources to
innovate for new product categories and customer segments while solving complex
supply chain problems.
NINJACART: INCEPTION AND JOURNEY TILL NOW:
To tackle the problem of agricultural produce wastage, Thirukumaran Nagarajan,
along with his friends, started Ninjacart. At first, they wanted to solve the problem by
helping retailers take their inventory online and delivering in less than 60 minutes
from ordering.
But soon they encountered different problems in this business model,

 Customers were unwilling to pay a premium price for just the convenience of
ordering online.
 Supply chain issues crept up with the inability to track real-time demand and
manage inventory.

With all these problems, the team realized that while there was a demand for the
service, the supply side had many inefficiencies associated with it to fulfill it. Hence,
they decided to pivot from the demand side to the supply side and build a fast B2B
supply chain for agricultural produce leveraging data.

According to Inc42 Analysis on India’s Agritech Landscape, the addressable market

opportunity in 2020 was $ 24.1 Bn out of which only $ 204 Mn was tapped (~1% of
the overall potential was tapped). This gives us a view of what Ninjacart and other
agritech startups can achieve in the future.

The startup was founded in 2015 in Bangalore, India. The last funding round (series
C) happened in October 2020, in which Ninjacart raised $ 49.7 Mn with a valuation of
$ 503 Mn. The total funding till now is $ 213 Mn. Ninjacart’s revenues stood at $ 59.1
Mn as of December 2019.

The company has grown significantly since its inception. In 2016, Ninjacart was
handling only 7 tonnes a day, and now the daily volume is close to 1400 of
vegetables and fruits from farm to retailers in just less than 12 hours and serves
around 17000+ retailers across 7 major cities in India – Bangalore, Chennai,
Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune, Mumbai, and Delhi. And, they have been doing this
with a delivery accuracy of 99.88 percent all year round. What business model
makes Ninjacart so successful?

NINJACART BUSINESS MODEL:

Ninjacart deals with the problem of inefficiencies in the supply chain by connecting
farmers with retailers and trying to remove the middlemen benefitting all the
stakeholders in the process (farmers, retailers and customers).

Farmers are directly connected with the retailers, helping them get better deals.
Simultaneously retailers are able to get fresh produce which helps them to serve
their customers.
According to the co-founder and CEO, Thirukumaran Nagarajan, one of the biggest
problems they have encountered is farmers not getting a fair price for their products.
They are trying to solve this problem by implementing a supply chain that leverages
data, technology, and a logistics network built from scratch as solutions like this don’t
exist in the market. 

NINJACART CREATING A DATA-ENABLED SUPPLY CHAIN:

Thirukumaran Nagarajan and the team did not have the expertise in the supply
chain, and in hindsight, that was a blessing in disguise. This helped them to create a
supply chain solution blending data and technology tailored for India.

With this model, Ninjacart was able to supply fresh produce to the retailers and
customers with hygiene and quality.

There are specific problems that Ninjacart addressed with their data-enabled supply
chain
1. End-to-end traceability on the supply chain: Every box or cart in the
CC’s, FC’s, and DC’s at Ninjacart has RFID (Radio Frequency
Identification) tags attached. This has led to a strong brand
establishment and continued trust.
2. Forecasting demand: Ninjacart’s long-term vision is to improve
efficiency in the supply chain and reduce wastage in transit. For this, they
have beautifully used technology such as Data Science, Artificial
Intelligence, Machine Learning to forecast demands. Their predictive
model takes many factors not limited to historical data, future
expectation, weather forecast data to predict weekly numbers at SKU
(Stock Keeping Unit) levels to minimize errors as far as possible. This is
the reason they have been able to maintain a 0.2% – 0.3% error rate for
the past six years.
3. Educating farmers about the expectation: Using the technology and
data available, Ninjacart educates them on the expectation which
benefits both the parties (farmers on the prices and amounts to harvest
and Ninjacart to reduce wastage)

GRASSROOT LEVEL SUPPLY CHAIN INNOVATIONS AND AWARDS:

Over the years, the B2B agritech startup has been refining and innovating processes
on a grassroot level to optimize their efficiency. These might seem trivial but have
given them great results.

 To reduce the time at the stops, the employees don’t wait for the boxes
to be emptied. The carts are picked up when vehicles are returning after
making the drop. Since the carts are RFID tagged, it doesn’t have to go
to the same distribution center
 Ninjacart has adopted the use of “dolleys” instead of traditional methods
which helps them load and unload the boxes in the fulfillment centers
With these innovations and creating a robust data-enabled supply chain, Ninjacart
has won many awards in the agritech category.

INCREASING BRAND VISIBILITY WITH SOCIAL IMPACT: A WIN-WIN

While the startup has aced the game of building technology and data enabled supply
chain, there is another initiative taken by Ninjacart which shows how great business
can create a huge social impact. In 2020 when the whole world struggled with a
pandemic caused by the deadly Coronavirus, Ninjacart stepped up to solve the
problem of their comrades, the farmers of India.

As the whole country went into lockdown, local vegetable and grocery stores also got
closed. This affected the farmers a lot. To solve this problem, Ninjacart launched an
initiative named HTF (Harvest the Farms), where the customers could directly buy
from the farmers at a cheaper price.

With the help of their technology-enabled processes, Ninjacart identified the excess
produce and buy it from the farmers at a price that covered their cost. Then it sold
those produce to customers at a lower price to reduce the wastage. This has
definitely put Ninjacart on everybody’s radar and the team deserves brownie points
for quick thinking and creating a beautiful solution to tackle the problems of the
nation’s backbone, the farmers.  

PROMISING AND EXCITING FUTURE OF UNIQUE BUSINESS MODEL OF

NINJACART:
Reduction of agricultural produce wastage has always been on the forefront of
Ninjacart’s vision. But, along the way the team realized that food safety is a bigger
problem. In 2018, the startup adopted the vision of providing “Safe food for one
billion”.

Ninjacart aims to provide “zero residue food” (having a low maximum residue limit
(MRL)) and has started to invest in technology. The startup has beautifully divided
into four different steps and named them FoodPrint, FarmPrint, ResiduePrint,
Affordability.

The startup is currently working on the beta phase of developing FarmPrint, which
will help them get nearer to producing zero residue food. Leveraging technology,
they will be able to monitor the whole process better.

ResiduePrint is in its early stage of development, and the startup is trying to make
the solutions durable and scalable.

A startup with an aim to create a strong societal impact, we are eager to witness the
business and technological prowess that the Ninajcart team displays in the future.