Ninjacart journey in inventing the wheel for fresh produce ecommerce.

• For months, a group of techies camped overnight at the fruit and vegetable market in the outskirts of Bengaluru with only one aim in mind: figuring out the complicated supply chain.

• This is what led to the birth of Bengaluru-headquartered B2B agritech startup Ninjacart, which has in four years notched up a delivery accuracy rate of 99.88 percent all year round.

• Founded by Thirukumaran Nagarajan and Vasudevan Chinnathambi in 2015, the agritech startup has successfully built a tech-enabled supply chain for fresh farm produce, delivering 1,400 tonnes of fruits and vegetables daily.
  

''No doubt, Ninjacart is solving an India-specific problem. Thiru says “We have gone deep to crack the problem from the roots.”

• India is the second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables globally, but this is just half the story. Around 10-15 percent of this produce is wasted because of various challenges, especially in effective management in the supply chain.
  

• Over the last four years, Ninjacart has been ardently going about solving this problem. The founding team believes that the core solution lies in the supply chain, from the time a vegetable/fruit leaves the farmer’s land and reaches a shop.

• Today, Ninjacart transacts over 1,400 tonnes of fruits and vegetables daily across seven cities; the produce is moved from the farms to retail stores in a span of 12 hours.

Thiru says, “It has been an incredible journey for us in the last four years. We believe that we are solving an India-specific problem and innovating for India from the grassroots."

• For starters, there is no supply chain software or infrastructure built for Indian conditions of handling fruits and vegetables. In the West, fruits and vegetables are transported in refrigerated conditions, a luxury in a market like India. So, Ninjacart had to build everything from the ground up without any domain expertise. Thiru strongly believes that not having a background actually benefited the founding team of Ninjacart otherwise “it would have been baggage”. “It is the best thing that has happened to us as we questioned everything and it helped us sort of build a much more unconventional supply chain,” he says.
  

Start and scale

Things started in a single city, Bengaluru, where the founders fine-tuned the entire process of sourcing vegetables from the farmers and supplying to shops. Investors like Qualcomm Ventures and Accel bet on them, and Thiru says it was because of the confidence they had in the team.

Thiru adds that they had to fix a number of things in the supply chain before they could show enough growth for the investors to be interested in them. There was no room for error, and Ninjacart took about 18 months to perfect the art and science of the supply chain, which is extremely unlike a typical ecommerce setup.

“The main thing about ecommerce is aggregation, sorting, and searching. In our supply chain, none of these things are actually there,”

Thiru says,“We started from the fundamentals; it's not like we had the money and force-fitted our model into the business. We actually created a natural model. People come with an understanding of how the supply chain works and then they force-fit their model on to it. We went module by module, and that's what helped us scale.”

A focus on quality

• When asked what his big vision for the future is, Thiru says this is “just the beginning” and that the processes employed by Ninjacart ensure that a higher level of quality standard is maintained.
  

• “We wanted to increase the standard of the food that an Indian consumes. Right now if you ask an average Indian, s/he does not know the origin of the food. It also boils down to the fact there is no supplier who can supply them that quality of food currently,” Thiru says.
  

• Given the dependence of the Indian economy on the agriculture sector, this is sort of “giving back to society” for Thiru. Coming from a lower-middle-class background and finishing his schooling and engineering at educational institutes heavily subsidised by the government, he has a strong commitment to creating value.
  

“The biggest value addition that we are doing is aiding the farming community to expand their business,” Thiru says.