In conversation with Incubees, we caught up with Harish Usgaonker, Co-founder and CTO of Agcetra, to talk about how technology is redefining the future of agriculture. In this candid exchange, Harish shares the story behind Agcetra’s inception, its mission to bridge the gap between tech and farming, and his vision for driving innovation and impact in the agritech space.
Incubees: Tell us about your product or services?
In July 2020, we launched Agcetra ( https://www.agcetra.com ) – a first-of-its-kind Digital Aggregator platform tailor-made for Urban Farming. Agcetra revolves around a unique concept of “Urban Farming for everyone”. With this, we want to make farming easy and fun for everyone. It will also ease the adaptability of new-age farming techniques for commercial farmers. We want to reverse the trend of people drifting away from agriculture. With modern techniques, growing food will be fun and lucrative too!
As a platform, Agcetra is built with a vision of bringing all stakeholders of the agriculture industry together with a vision to build a smart and technology-driven farming community and, in turn, upgrade the food production industry. The e-commerce capabilities of the platform will ensure that these stakeholders can do business together. Growers can hire consultants, enroll in training, or procure innovative products. The service providers or sellers get a medium to take their innovations to a lot more growers.
Incubees: What makes your products/services unique, and what competition do you see in India and globally?
There are a lot of startups working in the agriculture space. Our biggest USP is our niche and focus on Urban Farming. Urban Farming is an upcoming and futuristic segment of agriculture that focuses on new-age methods that can be done with minimal space requirements- indoors, roof-tops, homes, balconies, and any open spaces, and optimal use of resources like water.
Incubees: What are the challenges you see in the market at this point?
At present, urban farming technologies are expensive. This is a major concern. We are working with our partner vendors on our platform to solve this problem.
Incubees: Tell us about your team and what inspires them?
Ajay Naik, the founder & CEO, is a serial entrepreneur with 7 years of entrepreneurial experience and 10+ years of IT experience. Harish Usgaonker, the co-founder and CTO, has 14+ years of IT experience and 1.5 years of experience as a tech consultant for start-ups. Along with that, we have two very passionate developers- Anay Nayak and Nandan Prabhudessai, who joined us after their BE graduation. They have made a tremendous contribution in building and getting agcetra.com thus far. Royston Dias (Operations Executive) has shown exemplary promise as he worked on the initial launch, vendor onboarding, and demos. On the farming front, we have Sandeep Metri, who has been with us right from the beginning. He knows the nitty-gritty of urban farming that helps a lot in getting the best products on the platform.
Our biggest motivation is the vision and the impact that Agcetra can lead to. After the pandemic, we are talking about a lot of new normal. Urban Farming is also going to be a new normal in the near future, and we are excited to be working in this area and have the early mover advantage.
Incubees: Where do you see your product/service reaching in the next five years?
When we think of a search engine, we think of Google. Social media comes to mind, specifically Facebook. A chat application is also considered, such as WhatsApp. We want to be the first name for Urban Farming.
Incubees: Do you have plans to raise funding to grow your business or allow your business to organically grow?
Yes, we are aggressively working to raise funds. We are talking to various fund managers and pre-series investors. We have identified around 20 different pain-points in the urban farming arena, and we want to solve all those by making Agcetra AI-enabled. For this, we will need to grow our team, reach out to people, and also build a good customer support team. This is the right time for us to start the fundraising.
Incubees: What are the challenges you face as a startup?
Like any early-stage startup, funding is one of the biggest challenges that we have been facing, so that we can take this to the next level. Apart from that, we are also facing challenges with recruiting and keeping up with the pace of various user enquiries we receive, being a small team. A lot of users are also not aware of such techniques. However, we see that post-pandemic could have been the best time to launch a concept like Agcetra, when people are going towards becoming self-reliant. We also have a very active startup ecosystem evolving here in Goa with Startup Goa and the Startup Goa mission. Of course, the incubation centre we are presently incubated at FIIRE is also a great platform both for networking and grooming our entrepreneurial skills.
