Snippet
Yuktix is a Bengaluru-area agritech company, founded in 2013 by Rajeev Jha and Shailendra
Singh. Yuktix makes solar-powered IoT sensors and software, sold as GidaBits, to help growers
take soil moisture based irrigation, pest & disease management and other agronomy decisions
based on farm micro weather . Rajeev spent about 12 years building products at companies
including Oracle, Tech Mahindra, Citrix, and AOL before founding Yuktix. He says the sales that
built the company came mainly through corporate procurement, with R&D and farm trial teams
at large agriculture and food companies. . The company’s website says more than 10,000
farmers and over 30 organizations use its platform. Public funding databases list roughly
$462,000 raised across three rounds. Rajeev sees water saving and lower-cost satellite crop
monitoring as the strongest possible segments in the agriculture industry, and says that
agriculture digital products can support a real business but not a venture-scale one.
Rajeev Jha spent twelve years building products at companies like Oracle, Citrix, and AOL before leaving in 2013 to start Yuktix, a maker of IoT sensors for Indian farmers. Thirteen years on, he says individual farmers are not what kept it alive.
Yuktix, based outside Bengaluru, makes solar-powered IoT sensors and software that helps growers run optimized irrigation, pest & disease management and other agronomy decisions.. The sales that built the business came from somewhere less obvious. Large agriculture and food companies, ITC and Bayer among them, bought through their procurement teams. At Bayer, scientists tested the device against their own oven-based lab method, found the numbers matched, and realized a machine could replace work they were doing by hand.
“We never gave a free sample,” Rajeev says. It is the part he is proudest of. “Every one of those deals went through the rigorous procurement channels of established companies .”
Why the Farmer Wasn’t the Market
The push for venture scale in the agriculture sector was following the e-commerce playbook in India. Subsidize the customer until the habit forms. It worked for online shopping but it has not worked for farming.
Large professional farming businesses have the required technology as part of their operations, and so they were not actively looking for anything new. Smaller farmers have much bigger worries than digital systems and data. “You are maybe priority number twenty on their list,” he says. Every crop is also grown and sold differently, so a pitch and solution that works for one crop has to be rebuilt for the next crop.
The other popular playbook was cutting out the middleman using an app or technology. If a vegetable sells for ₹4 at the farm and ₹40 in the market, there seems to be ₹36 of value in the supply chain. Rajeev calls that analysis faulty. “The middleman isn’t a nuisance. He’s the liquidity provider,” he says. The middleman supplies working capital, and absorbs risk for the farmers. He also buys from the farmers, and holds the hand of sellers who don’t use phones or raise invoices. A startup would have to do all of that too.
Where the Business Is
His advice is to look for a problem that works the same across crops. Water is the clearest one, and it is where Yuktix started focusing on later, working with plantation crops like grapes and pomegranates and oranges. “Saving water is saving water,” he says, whatever you may be growing. One product and one message can reach many growers.
A second opportunity is satellite-based crop and plant health monitoring. Tracking plant health from space used to be very expensive. The data pipelines now exist, so someone technically sharp could offer it at roughly a tenth of the old cost. “It isn’t happening because nobody is doing it,” he says.
He is straightforward about the ceiling. Selling to corporate R&D teams is open space today, but he does not think it is venture-scale. “You can reach twenty, thirty, forty crore,” he says. “You can’t reach two thousand.” If he were starting again, he would go straight to businesses and keep the message sharp: this is help for R&D teams.
What He Would Change
The bigger lesson, he says, is about direction, not operations. Good people always know how to do the work. The harder question is where to push. “You can apply all the force you want and the wall won’t move,” he says. “You have to find the point where it rotates.” Nothing works without a money flywheel either. Someone funds you, you find a cost structure that works, or you find a new segment.
He also thinks the sector needs better policy. Incentives in India run along departmental lines, while real problems do not. A founder trying to export plant fiber to Europe needs a machine, a process change, traceability, and a market office, and each agency sends them to another.
And he has one request for anyone writing about this space. Tell the full story, with the pluses and the minuses, and point it toward action. The goal, he says, is for readers to go and do something good.
