Ninjacart: Disrupting Fresh Produce Supply Chain in India

ABSTRACT

In response to the broken agriculture supply chain caused by a lack of storage facilities, lack of transportation, and manifold intermediaries and lack of transparency and traceability, Thirukumaran Nagarajan launched Ninjacart, a leading agritech firm in India, in 2015, along with Sharath Babu Loganathan, Ashutosh Vikram, Kartheeswaran K K and Vasudevan Chinnathambi. After exploring the issues in the agriculture sector, Ninjacart shifted its operations from B2C to B2B, to leverage the profitable business opportunity. Ninjacart used advanced level supply chain algorithms that it developed in-house, predictive analytics, Big Data, IoT technology, and mobile applications to help farmers overcome the various issues they were grappling with. As of early 2020, Ninjacart became one of the largest fresh produce supply chain companies in India. With the Covid-19 pandemic leaving millions of farmers across India in the lurch, Ninjacart launched many initiatives. As part of its future plans, Ninjacart was banking on Machine Learning to improve operations. However, it faced several challenges. Having established itself as a prominent player, Ninjacart's next challenge was scaling up its operations while improving efficiency and profitability at the same time.