Vinay Nair has been an entrepreneur for 20 years, implementing technology in his role at an IT company, while his wife Dr Richa Nair, who has a PhD in science, manufactures biofertilizers and biopesticides. “It so happened that when she was going from farm to farm selling biofertilizers, like any other husband, I would accompany her during the weekend. As we went from farm to farm, explaining to the farmers the benefits of biofertilizers and so on, I realized that this was not sustainable. Thus, I could not reach the large area there,” says Vinay.
She soon started a mobile application to solve Richa’s problem, ensuring that she could now stay in Pune and advise a group of farmers. By the way, COVID-19 It hit and everyone was trapped at home. To remotely advise farmers, they built new technology.
“That’s when I realized that if I actually developed this technology for individual farmers, it would take a long time and we wouldn’t be able to achieve large-scale scale,” says Vinay, adding, “If the small agri-input company my wife ran could solve their problems, what would happen to big agribusinesses?”
Connect agricultural operations to post-harvest supply chains
The solution was to create a larger platform for businesses. With their technological expertise and deep knowledge in agronomy, they created KhetiBuddy, an integrated SaaS (software as a service) platform to connect agricultural operations with supply chains and post-harvest business processes.
Vinay is the founder and CEO of the company, while Richa is its co-founder and chief scientific officer, and entrepreneur Amit Maheshwari is the founding investor and strategic advisor. The solid foundation of the company is based on childhood relationships. Vinay, Richa and Amit were in school together. Ahmedabad.
“Climate-driven labor shortages and yield uncertainty are pushing agribusinesses to accelerate technology adoption across their farming networks. What’s driving the real excitement is not just the efficiency or novelty of digital tools, but the emergence of systems based on deep knowledge of agronomy: platforms that translate field realities into actionable insights, helping agribusinesses support farmers, reduce risk, and improve outcomes at scale,” says Richa.
The platform has more than 30 clients among medium to large agricultural companies and is scaling internationally, with partnerships in Europe and Canada.
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An AI platform too
Now, KhetiBuddy has moved up a notch by moving from a standard Saas platform to Artificial intelligence (AI). They have launched an AI-based enterprise software platform, Verdnt. “Verdnt connects farm-level data with business operations such as procurement, planning, compliance and sustainability. It helps companies gain real-time visibility, better manage risks and make smarter decisions using AI, while keeping data transparent and auditable,” says Vinay.
One of its biggest clients is a winery. “When they approached us, one of the challenges was that if they had to produce wine on time, they had to make sure that the grapes were produced on time. The same goes for the potato chip value chain: they have to make sure that the potato harvest is done on time. That visibility into production will only be achieved if there is an integrated system, with end-to-end data links,” says Vinay.
He Technology is helping farmers. who have acres under them. “You don’t go to each and every plot of land every day to see how your crops are doing. With the help of technology, one of our modules is a sensing model. Through satellite, we can identify which part of the crop could be under stress. We can identify and give indications so that the farmer can take action,” says Vinay.
Maheshwari says that from an investor’s perspective, this is the right time for KhetiBuddy to expand internationally because the problems we are solving are no longer local in nature. “In both emerging and developed economies there are fragmented agricultural value chains, lack of real-time data, traceability gaps and inefficiencies between farm, market and company,” he says.
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India has been a strong testing ground for the product, allowing the team to test the platform in one of the most complex agricultural ecosystems in the world. “That learning curve gives us a natural advantage when entering international markets that are now actively seeking scalable, technology-based agricultural solutions,” he adds.
“My decision to support international expansion is driven by a belief in the core problem, the adaptability of the platform and the opportunity to build a globally relevant agtech company from India, rather than limiting ourselves to a single geography,” says Maheshwari.