Alekh Sanghera spent his early career as a digital payments consultant at MicroSave, working on Bill Gates Foundation and World Bank rural finance mandates, before realising that the smallholder farmer's biggest problem was not credit but market access.

The Indian agritech startup he co-founded, FarMart, is now the country's largest output linkage platform, supplying Britannia, Reliance Retail, ITC, biofuel distillers, and animal feed giants while running a zero-inventory, asset-light business model.

In this conversation with host Akshay Datt, Sanghera explains why most B2B marketplaces fail by chasing the trade spread, how FarMart pays farmers same-day by securitising enterprise invoices through SEBI-registered NBFCs, and why the village retailer is infrastructure rather than friction in the Indian food supply chain. The timing matters: India just hit 20 percent ethanol blending, maize and broken rice are now the largest grain feedstocks, and capital-efficient agritech models are the only ones still attracting growth funding in 2026.

👉How FarMart hit a ₹3,600 crore revenue run rate without owning any warehouses, trucks, or inventory while running on a team of just 320 people.

👉Why every Indian B2B commodity startup that tries to make money on the trade spread eventually destroys either its farmers or its buyers, and how FarMart instead monetises a stack of platform, logistics, and finance origination fees.

👉What forced FarMart to pivot four times, from an Uber for tractors to a rural BNPL card to a retailer SaaS, before landing on the output linkage model that powers its current scale.

👉How FarMart turned 14,000 village retailers into a decentralised procurement force and why Sanghera refuses to disintermediate them despite a decade of startup orthodoxy that says otherwise.

👉Why the ethanol blending mandate, the AgriStack rollout, and the Bharat Mart trade corridor are quietly creating a multi-billion dollar pipeline for grain-based Indian agritech founders.

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00:00 - Inside India's Largest Agritech Output Platform

03:00 - FarMart's Four Big Buyer Industries

09:35 - The $400M Asset-Light Run Rate

16:45 - Why Mandis Fail Indian Smallholder Farmers

28:00 - Same-Day Payments Through Invoice Securitisation

36:00 - The Zero-Inventory Agritech Playbook

43:00 - Why Trading Spreads Never Make Money

1:07:00 - From Failed Tractor App to Profit

1:19:00 - FarMart's Public Listing Roadmap

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Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel