Understanding the Role of growth Drivers in Agri tech Startup Ecosystem: Experiences and Learning from Indian Cases

Abstract

"Increased start-up activity is beneficial to agricultural sector in addressing the bottlenecks in agriculture and as well empowering the stakeholders of agri value chain. In India, the start-ups working in the agricultural sector are confronted with two scenarios. One is, they account for only 7.37 % of total startups and the other is, only around 10.05 % are able to progress to scaling stage while more than 50 % are in their early stages of their life-cycle. Thus, the present study aims to understand the key drivers essential for agri start-ups to progress quickly through business life-cycle stages through a multi case study approach. As B2B is emerging as key revenue generating segment of agri tech start-ups, three agri tech start-ups in this segment having similar line of business and with common competition i.e., traditional agricultural markets are considered for the study. The findings indicated that higher education levels, expertise of managerial team and technological innovation are growth drivers through the ideation, validation and early traction stage. Strategic drivers namely vision, market-oriented opportunity switch, networking and market expansion are playing a key role in growth of identified start-ups. The short term and long-term strategic decisions pertaining to these strategic drivers derived out of day-to-day experiences and learning’s are major growth drivers in pushing the start-ups towards growth stage. While business strategies for achieving scalability, gaining investor confidence are vital growth drivers to attain scale-up stage. An improvement in operating revenues and assets derived out of growth factors is reflected in financial progress."