Mark Kahn remembers the moment his South Bombay friends realized he’d gone off script. It was 2010, and he was sitting at Woodside Inn in Colaba when someone asked where he’d been that week. “Patna,” he replied. His friend, who worked at Morgan Stanley, made him repeat it. Then called other people over to hear the American say it again.

I was a source of tremendous amusement for people that worked at Morgan Stanley. Everyone was like, regale us with stories of our own country, please.

That cultural dislocation, a Texas-born Harvard MBA touring poultry feed mills in rural Maharashtra instead of chasing banking bonuses, would become Mark’s defining edge. Today, as Managing Partner of Omnivore, he oversees a ₹1,800 crore fund ($215 million) that has systematically proven what India’s elite dismissed: rural India isn’t a charity case. It’s a sophisticated economy ripe for technological disruption.

The proof arrived in December 2025. After 17 years of patient capital deployment, Omnivore’s portfolio companies are crossing the finish line. Captain Fresh, the seafood B2B platform, confidentially filed for a $350-400 million IPO. DeHaat, India’s largest farmer platform managing 15,000+ micro-retailers, posted ₹3,000 crore in revenue for FY25 with a valuation near ₹5,690 crore. Arya.ag, the post-harvest fintech hybrid, delivered ₹32 crore in actual profit, a 70% jump year-over-year, on ₹5,738 crore in gross merchandise value.

These aren’t vanity metrics. They represent a structural shift Mark spotted before most investors knew “agritech” was a category.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Smallholder Thesis and The Great Sorting

Mark’s contrarian insight sounds simple: Indian farmers aren’t inefficient because they’re small. They’re efficient because they’re small. When I challenged him on whether large-scale farming, like in the US or Pakistan, wouldn’t be more productive, he flipped the question.

Is a Kirana shop unproductive? Think of when you think about a kirana shop and you’re like, this banya is on top of it every paisa. That’s the same with a smallholder farmer.

The data backs him up. Pakistan, with its zamindari system of large landholdings, produces less per hectare than India’s fragmented smallholder system. A 2-hectare farmer operates like a micro-entrepreneur with zero management overhead, living and dying by margins. Scale without skin in the game breeds inefficiency.

But the 2020-2022 funding bubble created carnage. Capital flooded into agritech, peaking in April 2022, then crashed. WayCool Foods, once a high-flying food distribution platform, imploded by 2025 with NCLT insolvency petitions and 200+ layoffs. Mark saw it coming.

There have been some pretty notable implosions, Waycool being probably the most prominent.

The correction separated winners from pretenders. The survivors share three traits: they focus on real profitability, they integrate financial services into their core model, and they avoid endless GMV growth funded by bridge rounds.

Arya.ag exemplifies this. The company doesn’t just move grain. It stores it in warehouses, provides loans against stored inventory, and helps farmers time their sales for better prices. This triad, storage plus credit plus commerce, generates actual profit. When HSBC and DFC extended $30 million in debt in early 2025, they were betting on a proven model.

Captain Fresh took a different path: it went global. With 98% of revenue from exports to the US and Europe, it sidestepped brutal domestic margins. The 145% revenue growth to ₹3,421 crore in FY25 and the IPO filing validate the export thesis for Indian agribusiness.

The Soviet System and the Biology Frontier

Mark doesn’t mince words about Indian agricultural policy. When I asked about reform, he delivered a diagnosis that would make bureaucrats wince.

In India, in agriculture, we subsidize inputs, chiefly fertilizer. We fix the price of outputs. The whole thing is positively Soviet. It doesn’t reflect the way we manage any other part of the economy. And it doesn’t reflect the fact that it’s fucking 2025, people.

His alternative: scrap fertilizer subsidies and the Food Corporation of India. Replace the entire apparatus with direct cash transfers of ₹1 lakh per farmer via the existing PM-KISAN infrastructure. India has Aadhaar, UPI, and Jan Dhan accounts. The pipes exist. The political will doesn’t.

The 2020-2021 farm law protests, which ended with dead farmers in Delhi and a government retreat, make any bold reform unlikely. Mark estimates the probability of his proposed overhaul at “nil, 0%.” But quieter reforms are working. AgriStack, India’s digital public infrastructure for agriculture, has generated 6.1 crore Farmer IDs linking Aadhaar to land records. This enables instant Kisan Credit Card approvals and targeted subsidies without leakage. It’s the reform politicians couldn’t pass, executed through technology.

Yet Mark’s most urgent thesis isn’t about farming. It’s about biology. He argues that India missed the software product wave, creating IT services but no Indian Google. In biotech, the pattern is starker.

Biotechnology, 2005, it was Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw. Twenty years later, who’s there? It’s still Kiran. It should be a point of national shame and frustration.

The BioE3 Policy, approved in August 2024, targets a $300 billion bioeconomy by 2030, up from $165 billion in 2024. It establishes Bio-Enabler Hubs to commercialize lab research. Omnivore is backing this shift through BioWave, a partnership with Nucleate and IndieBio, and portfolio companies like AltM, which converts agricultural waste into specialty chemicals.

The urgency is geopolitical. The US and China are racing ahead in synthetic biology. India, with its fermentation capacity and scientific talent, should be the alternative to China. But it needs risk capital willing to fund 10-year timelines.

The Long Bet Paying Off

Mark moved to India in 2008, took a 50% pay cut to join Godrej Agrovet, and spent six years touring feed mills from Khanna in Punjab to Siliguri in West Bengal. He learned Hindi arguing with dealers in Bihar. That operational baptism, not boardroom strategy, built his conviction that India’s “other half” was about to modernize.

In 2011, he co-founded Omnivore with Jinesh Shah when “agritech” didn’t exist as an investable category. The name came from Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the 2005 book that changed American consciousness about food systems. The joke: Mark (carnivore) plus Jinesh (orthodox Gujarati Jain) equals Omnivore.

Seventeen years later, the thesis is crystallizing. Fund III closed at ₹1,800 crore with backing from KfW, IFC, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and corporates like Louis Dreyfus and Yara. The portfolio spans digital platforms, climate hardware, space tech, and now biomanufacturing.

When the first Indian agritech unicorn is officially minted in 2026, likely Captain Fresh or DeHaat, it will vindicate a bet that began with a pale immigrant choosing Patna over Palo Alto. The transformation Mark witnessed in Vellore and Krishnagiri over two decades, the blurring of urban and rural, is now replicating across Bharat. And this time, the capital is ready.

Listen now!

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

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