A proper Made-in-India app that caters to the demands of the livestock owners looking to enhance their dairy production, a Bengaluru-based startup is opening new frontiers for the sector. Developed by two IIT-Delhi graduates and friends, Neetu Yadav and Kirti Jangra, the app named Animall Technologies is used to buy and sell dairy animals.
Two years after its inception, the company is now valued at $80 million or Rs 600 crore. Animall has raised Rs 160 crore from the country’s top venture capitalists such as Sequoia, Nexus, SIG, Omnivore, Beenext, Rocketship, WEH, amongst others. In the last two years, around 5 lakh cattle valued at Rs 2,500 crore have been sold on the platform, ahead of all the competition.
Talking to Bloomberg, Kirti Jangra remarked, “The narrative is not about breaking the glass ceiling, that’s very limiting. For me, the idea is to ignore the glass ceiling and do whatever we want. It’s a mental barrier if we think the seats at the table are only for the big guys. I’m at the table and I’ll sit at it.”
Both Neetu and Kirti come from the Hindi heartland belt where dairy farming is a major occupation. Yadav, 26, is a dairy farmer’s daughter from Rajasthan and 28-year-old Jangra’s father is a government employee in Haryana.
A perplexed family and an idea that came into being innocuously
Like any family, the parents of the duo were flabbergasted after their talented kids opted for a startup, especially after graduating from a prestigious institute as IIT. The parents wanted a stable job that paid salary on time but the idea, first conceptualized in 2019, drove the two women to pursue their dreams.
During an internal hackathon in 2019, Kirti and Neetu came up with the idea. Incidentally, Animall won both the jury and audience award at the hackathon for its uniqueness and simplicity. After talking to hundreds of dairy farmers, the co-founders started working on Animall as a weekend project in August 2019 and started seeing very strong user love and traction.
Personalized description of the cattle
Based out of Koramangala, Bengaluru, the ride, however, was not as simple as the duo imagined it to be. At first, Yadav and Jangra figured that users would be interested in the basic facts: age, lactation, price. But they found that buyers preferred a “personalised” description from the seller.
Talking to Bloomberg, Yadav gave an example of what the seller wanted to pitch and what the buyer wanted to hear. A dairy farmer described his cow as, “Seedhi, samajhdhar hai, time pe khaati, soti hai,” (She is simple and sensible, eats on time, and sleeps on time)
A super app for cattle buying/selling
The app has filters that allow the user to segregate a milk-producing cow, buffalo based on the average litre of milk it produces in a day. Furthermore, a tab called ‘Pashu Chat’ is also available on the app that helps the user to ask questions, to be addressed by the app community.
Interactive videos that enrich the knowledge regarding the know-how of rearing a dairy animal are also available, which according to the founders is a major hit.
The pictures of the animals are kept authentic as the farmers usually want to see the udders and unfiltered condition of the cow. The app’s biggest advantage is that it is completely in Hindi, at the moment.
Similarly, through a nominal payment, the app connects you to veterinary doctors, who advise you regarding the health of the animal. In nutshell, the Animall is one super-app for an individual’s dairy farming needs.
Talking about the prospects of tapping the sector, Yadav remarks, “100 million transactions happen every year with an average transaction value of Rs 50,000 and 80 percent of this is dairy cattle,”
Dairy farming sector in India
Harvesting animals for dairy and animal-based products in India is a major source of livelihood for 150 million dairy farmers. India is the world’s greatest milk producer, producing an average of 13,000 billion kilogrammes of milk every year.
Currently, the milk industry contributes 4% of GDP. Today’s milk availability per capita is 291 grams per day. According to projections, the country’s expected milk demand will reach 200MT per day by 2021-22.
Read More: Milk Mission India – Overall Progress and Detailed Report
India is blessed with a huge biodiversity of 43 indigenous cattle breeds and 13 Buffalo breeds which have survived over the last hundreds of years in respect of their suitability for specific purposes in the concerned local environment.
Through the Animall app, one can buy, say, a buffalo, cow, calf, ox, or any other domesticated animal of myriad breeds. The idea is novel and the execution so far, encouraging. As the app gets popular and more investment pours in, it could be a serious game-changer for the industry.