How Alekh Sanghera Built FarMart Into a $400 Million Agri-Supply Platform Without Owning a Single Warehouse
Inside the asset-light playbook, the single-truck unit economics, and the EBITDA-profitable quarter that has FarMart on a six-quarter runway to IPO
Somewhere in rural Madhya Pradesh tonight, a truck loaded with maize is rolling toward a distillery that will turn its cargo into ethanol, the kind India’s E20 mandate now blends into every litre of petrol. At this moment, roughly one lakh such trucks are in motion across the country, all coordinated by a 320-person company headquartered in Gurugram.
While Ninjacart’s operating revenue declined 19% year-on-year and WayCool laid off over 200 employees, FarMart quietly turned EBITDA-profitable in Q4 FY26 at a ₹3,600 crore annualised run rate, on $78 million of total capital raised. That is roughly a fifth of what its better-funded competitors burned through.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Grandfather and the Pivots
The trigger was personal. Alekh Sanghera’s grandfather, a six-decade farmer near Jalandhar, told his city-educated grandson that despite India’s tech revolution, farming had become an unrespected, unprofitable life. The data backed him up. Over 85% of Indian farmers are smallholders, fewer than 20% have institutional credit access, and machinery rentals alone consumed up to a third of seasonal earnings.
Alekh, who had spent his MicroSave years walking Western UP hinterlands auditing Direct Benefit Transfers for the Gates Foundation and the World Bank, understood why rural cash flows broke in ways most agritech founders never bothered to learn. In 2015, with boarding-school friend Mehtab Singh Hans, he founded FarMart.
What followed was four companies inside one. FarMart began as an Uber-for-tractors rental platform. It died on credit defaults. It pivoted to a BNPL credit card for farmers, profitable but impossible to scale before UPI rails matured. It pivoted again into a Khatabook-style ledger for village retailers. The product was sticky, but rural India would not pay for SaaS. Then in 2020, a small marketing-SMS feature inside the bookkeeping app went viral.
We had no idea about healthcare or education, so we picked agri. Then we built four different companies inside one before we figured out that the money in India is in commerce, not subscription.
The 10,000-plus village retailers using FarMart’s software were not customers to be monetised. They were a decentralised procurement army to be armed.
The Single Truck Theory
Today FarMart operates across 40-plus dry commodity categories, sourcing for Reliance Retail, Britannia, Parle, and a roster of biofuel distilleries riding India’s ethanol mandate. The mental model is simple.
Fundamentally, our unit is one truck. Imagine the multiplier effect of that single unit to get to 500 million dollars in scale. At any given moment, about one lakh trucks are on shipment. Lose one truck and your margin structure for the next seven days is gone.
Everything is engineered around bulletproof economics on one truck, then multiplied. Zero owned warehouses. Zero owned trucks, just 3,800 fleet partners. Zero retail storefronts, just SaaS-armed village aggregators. Ninety quality inspectors cover 110 districts as relationship managers. Computer-vision AI trained on five million images grades batches with 85-97% accuracy without anyone leaving the village.
The compensation philosophy is equally contrarian.
If you try to make money on the trade, you’ll never make money. Your spread will either hurt the farmer or hurt the buyer. We make money on offtake fees, platform fees, finance origination, logistics fees. The services stack is where the company lives.
If the model is so clean, why hasn’t capital replicated it? Alekh’s answer reframes the question. B2B agri is structurally a positive working capital business. Buyers pay in 30 to 60 days. Farmers demand instant liquidity. Most agritechs died trying to bridge this gap with their own balance sheets.
FarMart’s solution: securitise institutional invoices through SEBI-registered NBFCs, route capital from asset managers into farmer payments, charge origination fees of 0.5 to 1.5% to both sides. Britannia and Adani paper carry top ratings. Alekh turned the creditworthiness of his buyers into the working capital for his sellers. In domestic output linkage, only ITC is larger, moving 16-20 lakh tonnes annually against FarMart’s 11-12. Functionally a duopoly.
The Tailwinds and the Runway
Three forces are compounding in FarMart’s favour. India hit E20 ethanol blending in 2025, five years ahead of schedule, with E27 targeted by 2030. Grain-based ethanol capacity for ESY 2025-26 exceeded 13,000 million litres, eclipsing sugarcane molasses. FarMart became one of the largest grain aggregators feeding distilleries, quietly monetising India’s energy independence policy.
The Digital Agriculture Mission has generated 84.8 million farmer IDs by early 2026, collapsing verification cost the way Aadhaar did for fintech. And the 2.7 million sq ft Bharat Mart at JAFZA Dubai opens late 2026, where FarMart already runs an office and where its consumer brand FarMart Pantry, 27 SKUs across atta, basmati and millets, launched first before hitting Zepto and Blinkit shelves in India.
That last move changes the margin story. Bulk B2B trade caps gross margin at 11-12%. Processed exports hit 25%. Quick-commerce private label hits 35-40%.
Vertical integration is a moat. If you really want to be a very large, profitable business, the revenue has to be the sum of the parts. The B2B services give scale. The processing and brand give the absolute profit pool.
The numbers do the talking. ₹2,340 crore paid directly to rural nodes in 2025. 18,000 tonnes of food loss prevented. 23,000 tonnes of carbon emissions averted. Revenue per employee crossing $1 million. A spot on the Avendus-Hurun India U35 List 2025 and Fortune India 40 Under 40. The IPO timeline, by Alekh’s own articulation, is six quarters away.
We want to be a public company because we want to show this can be done. Globally, $18.5 billion has gone into agritech in the last decade and there haven’t been outcomes. We want to be the outcome.
In a funding winter, the founder who survives is rarely the one with the most capital. It is the one with the cleanest unit.
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