How this Agritech Startup Carnot Technologies is helping farmers to go digital

• ByStartupStory     |    September 18, 2021

“It’s easy to point out from outside how things can be done smartly or in a more productive way. But it’s difficult when you actually do it. The real job is to get into the arena and fight it out with death and glory. Another significant factor is to be clear about the direction in the long term in which the company is being looked upon,” Pushkar Limaye, Co-Founder, Carnot Technologies

in an interesting interview with Startup Story

From IIT Bombay Racing to Carnot Technologies

Back in 2012, these three IITians along with other team members created an electric racing car and represented India for the first time at Formula Student. Now, the IIT Bombay Racing team is in the Top 10 across the world. However, the whole experience made Pushkar perceive that the quality of engineering they applied was quite different from the way it was approached by other teams there. And that whole experience led the three founders to start with Carnot Technologies to fill those gaps and transform the traditional way of doing engineering to a newer way. Initially, they started with a vision of building connected cars; even worked with ICICI, Uber for more than a year and sold 12K devices. The business was working well however, there was a very little IP differentiation in this sector, hence they looked for a pivot.  Later, the company developed a patent on engine information from the battery voltage of the vehicle as a part of Qualcomm’s Design India Challenge(QDIC-2017), where they were one of the 3 out of 400 startups to win a 100K USD grant. that grabbed the attention of esteemed organizations such as Mahindra, Napino. Afterwards, Mahindra invested in Carnot Technologies and they got exposed to the arena of India’s Agri sector. That’s how they pivoted to Agri-tech in 2017.
Mumbai-based Agritech Startup, Carnot Technologies founded by Rohan Vadgaonkar, Pushkar Limaye and Prathamesh Joshi work with an aim to improve the incomes of farmers through technology.

Products Offered

Foremost they offer Simha Telematics that help small rental tractor entrepreneurs and enterprises in getting the data regarding their tractor such as how much it travelled, how much area it got covered, where is the area. Hence, answering all these questions for effective billing. Moreover, it offers fuel monitoring and management, provides GPS Location, work status report, easy accounting and work history, thus making an enterprise ready product. Currently, the company has 10K+ devices operational and the scale is seeing subscription rate for the Simha Kit as high as 70% which is the biggest valuation of the product success.
Another offering is Krishi Diary that allows farmers to maintain their daily record and all expenses. Apart from accounting, advisory, farm level task management, training of people who are going to the farm or training of the farmers, soil report, etc. Carnot Technologies in collaboration with Mahindra’s one of the initiatives Krishi. The company takes care of the tech and product of Krishi. “We have around 3,00,000 lakh farmers on the individual farmer app and 6,000 acres of managed farm lands. The product falls under our SmartFarm offering, which takes care of end to end value-chain in the agriculture ecosystem. This is a web+app suite of products which can be customized as per need,” said Pushkar.

Customer experience

On being asked about the customer experience Pushkar said that the company believes in connecting with the end customer. For that he even did contract farming to know more about their product whether the customer is satisfied or not. “After doing hands-on farming and after talking with the customers. Now, probably we think that this customer segment is as diverse as it can get. There’s no one person, one thing that comes to mind when we say building for farmers. I think there’s a specific segment of farmers which see things from a business perspective. For now, I believe we’re developing products for this segment where there’s already little awareness or eagerness to earn extra money. These are particularly young farmers who aren’t given up on farming and are looking for ways to earn more money.” He further added that it has been seen that these farmers are well aware of digitalization and we’re giving them easy tech enablement that helps in earning more and saves their time as well.

The team at Carnot Technologies

Pushkar told us that he undertakes tech, product and the CTO. Rohan, CEO at Carnot Technologies, he looks at Strategy and Product. Another CEO, Prathamesh Joshi is the principal engineer. They not only believe in just a skill-oriented team, “infact we back attitude over aptitude.” They love to get hands-on folks who are willing to learn on the go and are good at translating knowledge into impact in the real world.    bPushkar said a lot of team members in our company are from the student competition team. All the people have come from first principles. “They have failed in doing things. They have built things. They approach things with a lot more respect and understanding about our work.”

Future Plans and funding

The company is looking to expand Carnot Technologies to a global audience. Pushkar said “There are two ways to do this. One, we can enable an IOT solution for anyone to agri as well as non-agri or any company or corporate who owns thousands of acres of land we can provide them customized solutions for farm management. That’s how we are looking to expand.”
The company has raised a seed round of funding in 2015 from Sandeep Tandon and Kunal Shah. In 2017, the company won a grant from Qualcomm design in India Challenge. In 2018, Mahindra and White Board invested in Series A. Later Series B was raised by Mahindra, and they gave a good exit to the seed and Series A investors.

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