Stellapps: Driving Farmer Prosperity through Tech-enabled Solutions

“As an organisation, we are committed to significantly improvinge farm profitability via value-added, technology-led platform services and our business growth has been innately inclusive and responsible,”, says Ranjith Mukundan, CEO and Co-founder, Stellapps Technologies.

Stellapps is a tech driven, end-to-end, dairy led food value chain platform. It leverages advanced analytics and artificial intelligence through its full-stack IoT platform to enable dairy ecosystem partnerships with financial and insurance institutions, veterinary services, cattle nutrition providers and, agro-input providers to create significant value for each stakeholder, including smallholder farmers. Stellapps was started in 2011 by building out the foundational parts of its Digital Access Network (DAN) and as an entry strategy, providing end-to-end digitised supply chain solutions. Today, Stellapps is leveraging the same to realise an end-to-end food value chain platform and providing value-added services such as dairy market linkages, agro inputs and financial services to small holder farmers. Our village level collection centres , also known as moo ONE service centres, are our physical village level anchor points for the farmers to engage with us and access different products and services as well as scientific advisory. Farmers also engage with us through our smartFarms app and our moo ONE call centre.

In its journey of last 11 years, Stellapps has interacted very closely with the farmers and understood their livelihood sources, needs, aspirations and challenges. Understanding the farmers, especially the small- and mid-sized farmers, sharpened the insights about the gap and opportunities to make a difference in the Agri/Dairy space through creating a “string of pearls” approach. “We realised that providing market linkage is one of the biggest enablers to ensure a stable income stream for the dairy farmer and that led us to rendering the market linkage service: mooMark (to provide high quality, traceable milk to FMCG/D2C companies). We built a strong procurement network backed with a solid farm intervention team that worked closely with farmers to help them implement modern methods of dairy farming. We will provide about 250,000 litres per day of mooMark’d milk by the end of this year, from the southern, northern and western regions in India.

Milk as a service traditionally has been a regional phenomenon, However, Stellapps has converted milk into a demand backwards - region agnostic service, hence, making it scalable beyond a small region and making it a national phenomenon.

Other than providing market linkage services for milk, we also realised that a key component in helping the farmer to improve the quality and quantity of milk is the inputs in terms of nutrition support for the cattle. This understanding got us started with the farm input services- mooGrow. Through mooGrow, farmers gain hyper-local access to high quality agro-inputs and farm equipment on-the-go through our app and village level collection centres. “A shorter turnaround time along with an assurance of quality is a competitive edge for us with respect to other agri-tech companies operating in rural India,” says Ranjith Mukundan.

mooGrow currently offers cattle feed, feed supplement , milking machines, generic medicines, bio-digester under dairy category. Under Agri category farmers are sourcing hand implements, sprayers, pheromone traps, drip pipes, vegetable transplanter, solar torches and value added dairy products like Gulab Jamun.

With the vision of building a holistic farmer offering, mooPay was set up to cater to the financial needs of farmers. mooPay is creating financial inclusion and economic empowerment of small holder farmers and more than 65 per cent of its customers are farmers who have never taken a loan from a regulated entity (finance company or bank).

Using the historical data of the quality and quantity of milk that farmers pour, mooPay has developed an alternative creditworthiness score, called mooScore™ in conjunction with Equifax, one of the world’s leading credit bureaus. This milk-based scoring analysis enables mooPay to provide loans to ‘new-to-credit’ / subprime farmers. Farmers avail of different loans based on their requirements. The lending products include milk receivable financing, small/sachet loans, cattle loans and farm improvement/farm equipment loans. mooPay will touch monthly disbursals of ₹ 10 crores by end of FY23.

Farmers are also accessing different financial services as Aadhaar based payments, domestic money transfer, bank account opening from our moo ONE centres. The payment gateway/platform of mooPay transfers ₹ 27 crores to the farmers bank account every month against the milk procured.

Stellapps' journey of growth and expansion has always been driven by the underlying ethos of making a difference to rural economy with 100 per cent commitment towards sustainable development goals.

Stellapps has partnered with 2.1 million women farmers in India, who are now taking ownership of their own dairy farms and many of them are also running our village-level collection centres (mooMark Extension Point). With initiatives like fully solar powered milk chilling plant and EVs Stellapps has been working consciously towards reducing carbon footprint.

Stellapps will continue to work towards the mission of improving income levels of the Indian farmer and fostering a rural entrepreneurship its technology led innovative solutions while reducing the environmental impact.