Long before apps and algorithms, India’s agricultural trade ran on something far older — trust passed down through generations, sealed with a handshake in a dusty mandi. Every grain, every sack of produce, every rupee changed hands through a web of traders who knew the business better than any spreadsheet ever could.
But that same trade, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, was quietly bleeding value to inefficiency, mistrust, and missing information. Five founders looked at this ancient system and asked a simple question: what if trade could finally catch up to technology — without losing what made it work?
The Problem Hiding in Plain Sight
In early 2019, five professionals sat down in Gurugram with a shared frustration. They weren’t farmers. They weren’t traditional agri-traders. They came from very different worlds — technology, finance, consulting, SaaS — but they kept circling back to the same observation: India’s agricultural trade, a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars, was still running on trust built over generations, paper ledgers, and word-of-mouth reputation, with almost no digital infrastructure supporting it.
B2B traders controlled roughly 75 percent of India’s agricultural value chain, yet they had almost no access to modern technology, reliable information, or formal credit. Farmers grew the produce, but once it left their hands, it entered a maze of mandis (wholesale markets), commission agents known as artiyas, brokers called dalaals, loaders, and countless intermediaries — each adding friction, and often uncertainty, to a transaction that should have been simple: sell what you grow, get paid what you’re owed.
This was the gap that founders Nukul Upadhye, Mahesh Jakhotia, Jitender Bedwal, Daya Rai, and Nikhil Tripathi decided to walk into. Together they brought deep experience spanning agri-tech, finance, consulting, and SaaS. None of them wanted to reinvent the wheel by cutting out the traders who’d spent their lives mastering this trade. Instead, they wanted to hand those traders better tools.
The First Steps: Boots in the Mud, Not Just Code on a Screen
The company was founded in April 2019 in Gurugram, but the founders knew that a slick app alone wouldn’t win over a market built on decades of personal relationships and hard-won trust. So instead of staying behind laptops, they went to the source.
Mahesh Jakhotia spent weeks traveling across Uttar Pradesh, testing an early, rough version of the product directly with farmers and traders in the field. This wasn’t market research in the conventional sense — it was closer to an apprenticeship. The team needed to understand the actual language of the mandi, the informal credit systems traders relied on, the way prices were negotiated, and the quiet but crucial trust signals that determined whether one trader would do business with another.
That fieldwork paid off fast. Just one month after founding the company, in May 2019, the team had already launched a minimum viable product — a remarkably quick turnaround that reflected both urgency and clarity of purpose. They named the company Bijak, after the traditional receipt or trade slip used in Indian mandis to record a transaction — a small but deliberate signal that they weren’t trying to replace the culture of the trade, they were trying to modernize its backbone.
The product that emerged was deceptively simple in concept: a B2B marketplace connecting buyers, sellers, traders, wholesalers, food processors, retailers, and farmers, letting them discover real-time prices, digitize their bookkeeping, request advance payments, and build a visible trust and rating history instead of relying purely on personal reputation. Crucially, the app was built in local languages and customized with mandi terminology traders already used, so it felt familiar rather than foreign.
Earning the First Believers
Convincing investors to back an unglamorous, offline-heavy, trust-dependent trade like agri-commodities wasn’t an easy pitch in 2019. But the team found early champions who understood the scale of the opportunity. Sequoia Capital selected Bijak as one of 20 early-stage startups from India and Southeast Asia for the second cohort of its Surge accelerator program — a strong early validation for a company barely out of its MVP phase.
That momentum translated into capital remarkably quickly. Within six months of being founded, in September 2019, Bijak raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Omnivore, Omidyar Network, and Sequoia Capital India.
Notably, this marked the first agritech investment in India for both Surge and Omidyar Network India — meaning Bijak wasn’t just raising money, it was convincing sophisticated investors to bet on an entirely new thesis about how Indian agricultural trade could be digitized.
Founder Nukul Upadhye framed the ambition clearly at the time, describing the goal of tackling accountability and trust gaps in a $200 billion market with more than five million middlemen. That framing mattered — Bijak wasn’t positioning itself as a disruptor trying to eliminate traders, but as an enabler trying to arm the existing ecosystem with better tools.
Scaling Through the Pandemic
What followed was a period of extraordinarily fast growth, made more remarkable by the fact that much of it happened during the pandemic — a moment when physical mandis faced disruption and digital trade infrastructure suddenly became far more valuable.
Within about 18 months of launch, Bijak had scaled to roughly 600 regions across 25 states and facilitated trade in over 100 agricultural commodities. One investor later remarked that Bijak had exceeded expectations for how quickly an agritech company could scale in India.
The funding kept pace with that growth. In mid-2020, Bijak raised $12 million in a Series A round backed by RTP Global, Omnivore, and Omidyar Network India, among others. The company used this capital not just to expand geographically but to deepen its product — adding features like aggregated logistics to reduce wasted truck capacity, and embedded financing so traders and producers could access working capital without waiting on delayed payments.
By late 2021, the numbers had grown substantially again. Bijak had scaled to more than 600 regions across 28 states, facilitating trade across over 110 agri-commodities, with co-founder Mahesh Jakhotia noting the platform was processing transactions worth over ₹1.5 billion on a monthly basis.
Co-founder Daya Rai spoke often about the mission in broader, almost generational terms — framing Bijak’s work as an attempt to close a socio-economic divide in Indian agriculture, one that might take more than a single founding team’s lifetime to fully resolve.
The Series B and a New Scale of Ambition
In January 2022, Bijak closed nearly $20 million in a Series B round, led by Bertelsmann with participation from existing investors — bringing the company’s total funding to $35 million and pushing its valuation to around $180 million.
This capital fueled a shift from simply connecting buyers and sellers to building a fuller financial and logistics layer underneath Indian agri-trade. The company leaned into a hard truth about the sector: roughly 80 percent of agri-commodity trades in India happen on credit, making trust and payment security just as important as price discovery.
Bijak built tools to address the very real risks that occur once produce leaves a farmer’s premises — quality disputes, price disagreements, and the kind of value erosion that could see an average 10 percent quality-based deduction happen outside a transparent platform.
By 2022, Bijak had crossed $500 million in annualized gross merchandise value, and expanded its offering into specialized platforms like Bijak Vyapaar and Bijak Mandi, deepening its footprint across different layers of the trade.
A Philosophy of Enabling, Not Replacing
What stands out most about Bijak’s journey isn’t just the funding milestones — it’s the consistency of its founding philosophy. In later reflections, Nukul Upadhye described the company’s approach as deliberately staying out of the way of parts of the supply chain that already worked well, and instead focusing squarely on the gaps: data, financing, and technology adoption. The company positioned itself as a partner to traders and to other agritech startups alike, rather than a competitor trying to disintermediate an entire ecosystem overnight.
Today, Bijak connects over 30,000 traders across more than 200 agricultural commodities in over 2,000 mandis, a scale few would have predicted from a five-person team testing an MVP in the fields of Uttar Pradesh just a few years earlier. Its journey is a reminder that some of the most powerful startup ideas don’t come from inventing something entirely new — they come from noticing an old, essential system, and quietly building the trust infrastructure it always needed.
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Conclusion
Bijak’s journey is a reminder that the biggest opportunities aren’t always found in inventing something new — sometimes they’re hidden inside systems that already work, just inefficiently.
By choosing to strengthen India’s agricultural trade rather than replace it, the five founders built something traders could actually trust: a platform that respected decades of hard-earned market knowledge while finally giving it the technology, credit access, and transparency it had always lacked.
From a one-month-old MVP tested in the fields of Uttar Pradesh to a platform processing hundreds of millions in trade volume, Bijak’s growth reflects both ambition and restraint — scaling fast, but staying focused on solving real gaps rather than chasing hype. Its more recent contraction is a reminder that even promising startups face real headwinds.
Still, Bijak’s core idea — that trust, not just technology, is the real infrastructure of trade — remains a lasting lesson for agritech and B2B marketplaces everywhere.