Three of us on the JioGenNext Founder Talk

Most founder interviews on agriculture AI feature one of us. This one features all three. Pratik, Lokesh, and I were on the JioGenNext Founder Talk in April 2024, and the producers kept the format loose enough that we could answer different parts of the same question from our three angles.

That format is the part I want to underline. KissanAI is one of the few startups I have seen where the cofounders’ roles are clear enough that a three-person interview works without us stepping on each other. Pratik carries the why of the company and the technical bets. Lokesh talks through the model stack and what a field deployment actually demands of it. My part is the business: how an agribusiness contracts with us and what the unit economics look like once a deployment is in production.

A few parts of the talk have kept resurfacing in customer conversations since.

The product is built for two very different buyers. A government extension service procures on different criteria than a large agrochemical enterprise, and the platform has to flex for both without losing what makes it work for the farmer at the end of the line.

Pratik also gets into cost discipline. We have pushed the cost of a useful farmer interaction below ₹5. That number compounds across deployment scale. A competitor coming at the smallholder market from a US cost structure does not get to the same number.

Then there is the operating model. Most of the JioGenNext cohort companies were running with distributed engineering teams. KissanAI’s research and engineering sit in the same room in Surat, and the field deployments cycle through that room too. A farmer asks a question, the team notices the gap, and the next model checkpoint can address it without the problem getting lost between departments. The talk gets into what that looks like day to day.

The JioGenNext relationship goes back a while for KissanAI; the Founder Talk channel is the public-facing arm of the accelerator and a useful place to see the operating reality of Indian deep-tech startups across cohorts. The full episode is at youtube.com/watch?v=gL473kTgOG4.