Gold Farm: Making cultivation easy through ecommerce

In a scenario, when most of the youth in the country are not finding interest in the agriculture sector, Gold Farm decided to venture into the field. AK Surya Power Magic, a Bengaluru-based technology startup that focuses on the farming sector, launched Gold Farm, a mobile application that helps farmers get farming equipment on rental basis, in September 2015.

The company, founded by Karthic Ravindranath and Abhilash Thirupathy, was earlier based in Coimbatore, and  shifted to Bengaluru seven months ago. With a vision to make agriculture profitable for farmers by bringing in transparency and an organised ecosystem for agricultural inputs, products and services, the startup is marrying new-age technology with traditional farming and helping optimise resources. “We are aggregating factors... we are an app-based model... we are actually an ecommerce company, but currently, follow assisted ecommerce model,” says Ravindranath, who is also a Director at Gold Farm.

“Since most of the farmers don’t have access to smartphones, in order to reach out to the larger base, we have to use unconventional ways,” Ravindranath adds. Currently, the company is servicing small-scale farmers as well. The company has agents, which they call ‘farmer advisors’, who get in touch with cultivators and book equipment for them on the farmer advisor app. “A predominant amount of bookings come from the farmer advisor apps,” he says. The remaining bookings for the company comes from their call centre based in Hubballi. Based on the bookings, the company allocates the nearest tractor to the farmer.

Gold Farm has indigenously developed its propriety product Honey Bee, which is a fully-integrated IoT-based technology to enable hiring services of farm equipment in a sustainable way, and provides a high level of operational control at scale. Honey Bee is an end-to-end solution for aggregating farm equipment from booking, scheduling, dispatching and monitoring of operations. “The core problem to address was to understand and develop a complex ecosystem to market emerging products and services to rural India specific to agriculture,” he adds.

The three-year-old startup has grown to a team of 100 members. “We have touched the lives of thousands of farmers across India by converting over 5,000 hectares of barren land to cultivable land bringing livelihood and prosperity to farmers,” Ravindranath adds. The company has raised funds from Infuse Ventures, an IIM Ahmedabad-based venture capital firm. “We have raised $2.5 million till now,” he says. “Our innovative technology for aggregation of farm equipment allows farmers access to affordable and reliable sources,” Ravindranath concludes.