Freshokartz Agri: An E-Commerce Company for fruits and Vegetables

Freshokartz Agri is a marketplace for fruits and vegetables. It is founded by Nagendra Yadav and Rajendra. 

“It works on an on-demand procurement model to provide fresh fruits and vegetables to the hotel, café, restaurant and other commercial kitchens that are directly procured from farms”, says Nagendra. 

We got an opportunity to talk with Nagendra, one of the co-founders of Freshokartz Agri and see what he has to say. I am sure his interview with us will inspire you.

Give a brief info about your startup?
Freshokartz Agri Products is an e-commerce marketplace for fruits and vegetable in Jaipur. It works on an on-demand procurement model to provide fresh fruits and vegetables to the hotel, café, restaurant and other commercial kitchens that are directly procured from farms.

 

What made you start your startup and what problem does it solve?

We both (Nagendra and Rajendra) founders are from a farming background and did farming in the early days of our lives. We did our initial education till secondary from our villages. After graduating from IIIT Jabalpur(This is where we met) we both started our corporate career in different companies in different cities. Even being in different part of the world we continued our discussion about solving the problems we faced during our early age because of farmers situations in the rural area. We wanted to do something for farmers and for agriculture field. When we started living in metro cities then we realized everything is very costly, especially vegetables but farmers are not getting good prices. One day when Rajendra was buying the onion in Mumbai its price is twice of what his father was getting for his onions. In our next discussion, we brought this point and did some research in this field and found this huge difference in prices is because of multiple levels of mediators and wastage in the supply chain. We decided to visit Jaipur for our initial research about the market. The problem was real, there was a huge price difference and no quality standard followed. There were multi-levels of mediators involved from farms to end consumers and everyone keeps their margins.

 

Tell us about yourself, your previous jobs/ventures? What were you doing before this startup?

Nagendra Yadav (Age:25): Nagendra completed his schooling form his village near Gorakhpur (U.P.). After graduation from IIIT Jabalpur in computer science, he started working With SAS Institute as Techno-functional consultant for clients in the Middle East and Australia.

Rajendra Lora(Age:25): Rajendra completed his schooling form his village in Nagour district of Rajasthan. He did his btech in computer science and Engineering from IIIT Jabalpur. After graduation, he worked as a software developer in Suvidhaa Infoserve Mumbai and a Project Manager- tech in an early stage startup.

 

Where is your startup based out of? Why do you think that is the best place for you?

Jaipur is one of the biggest city in tier 2 segment and there are a lot of farmers in its nearby rural area so easy to do the procurement of farm fresh produces. Apart from above fact, Rajendra is from the nearby village and he knew the place very well so it gave us the comfort of running our operations in this City.
Who are your competitions and how are you better than them?

This field is very big and no big organized player yet. We feel our biggest competition is with local Mandy. We are superior to our competition because of below qualities
1. Tech enabled supply chain
2. Tech enabled platform for customers
3. Better customer service
4. Tech enabled demand forecasting that helps us in our procurement
and many more ….

 

How hard is it to have a work-life balance as a startup founder and how do you manage it?

Work-life balance was not very good initially but now we are more organized and bigger team so it’s better. In this whole situation, we got support from our families and friends. They always kept motivating us in our difficult situations. We both have been biggest strength for each other throughout this whole startup journey

 

Have you raised funding? If yes, then we would like to know the details. If no then please tell us if you are looking to raise.

We bootstrapped for 14 months and raised our angel round recently. Along with angel round, we got support from Rajasthan government as part of the iStart program. Through Bhamashah Techno fund: 20 Lacs and 10 Lacs for marketing assistance. We are also being incubated by iStart incubator as part of an iStart program run by Rajasthan government to support early-stage startups.
What gets you excited about this company?

It has always been thrilling for us to solve some real-life problems. When we meet and talk to our customers and farmers we feel that we are solving some real problems. The feeling of solving some real problem and the response from people associated with us exits us the most.

 

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