Madhur Jain and the value of what farmers leave behind

A farmer finishes a harvest and has something left over. Stalks, stems, the material that refuses to fit into the tidy idea of a crop. For Madhur Jain, those leftovers belong near the centre of a business conversation. They can become biochar, a form of carbon storage, and part of a transaction with a buyer thousands of miles away. The field has another product, provided someone can do the work of making it count.

Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Varaha, which he started in 2022 with Ankita Garg and Vishal Kuchanur. Its projects span regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, biochar and enhanced rock weathering. The vocabulary sounds rather grand beside a pile of crop residue. That distance is where his working life becomes useful: he spent years in agriculture before asking international companies to pay for outcomes on farms.

His story offers a way into carbon removal through a person’s accumulated experience. Procurement came before purchase agreements. Farmer advice came before carbon accounting. Building teams came before building Varaha. Each job added a different view of the same practical problem: how to make a useful change work for people whose livelihoods depend on the next season.

An education that kept returning to the farm

Jain trained as an agricultural engineer, then studied at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad from 2011 to 2013. His MBA focused on agribusiness management. The combination gave him two ways of examining agriculture: the mechanics of production and the organization of a business around it. A crop needs both, though business school tends to offer better chairs.

His early professional work included supply chain and procurement projects at Godrej Agrovet in rural India. These are jobs built around dependencies. A purchase has to reach the right place. A process has to survive the circumstances in which it is used. The relevance to his later company is easy to see: carbon projects also require a sequence of people and decisions to hold together.

He went on to become the founding India Country Director at Precision Development, a social enterprise co-founded by economist Michael Kremer. By the account in Jain’s 2024 Milken biography, the farmer user base grew from 5,000 to more than 615,000 during his time there. Agricultural advice had become a problem of reaching people at scale.

Before Varaha, he also led digital business at Grow Indigo. His professional biographies describe building three business verticals and their teams from scratch. By the time he became a founder, starting things inside existing organizations was already part of his working repertoire. Entrepreneurship arrived after a considerable apprenticeship in getting an enterprise to function.

Three founders, and a reason to go to the ground

Varaha began with a team rather than a solitary founder’s revelation. Garg became its chief operating officer; Kuchanur its chief technology officer. Jain took the CEO role. Garg is also his wife. Their company joined commercial decisions, field operations and technology around a common customer problem: smallholders needed a practical reason to adopt new practices.

In describing the early days, Jain recalled Garg going out to meet prospective farmer partners, learn about their needs and collect feedback on the proposed program. That detail deserves room in the story. It puts listening ahead of expansion. A scheme that looks sensible from a desk still has to earn a place in someone else’s working day.

Jain has described his own background as a decade centred on food and agriculture, including a brief period in venture investing and work as an early-stage operator. Working with farming communities taught him about the intersection of agricultural practices, emissions, yields and soil. Varaha assembled those experiences into a company with a new source of potential revenue.

A $4 million seed round followed in 2022. Money made further work possible, but Jain’s explanation of the founding emphasized talent, experience and going to the ground quickly. Those priorities fit the business he was attempting. Farmers cannot pay their bills with enthusiasm for an elegant model; the model needs to behave itself in a field.

A credit has to survive the journey

“We look at farmers and their farmland as our focus,” Jain has said. In practice, that means working through organizations such as NGOs, cooperatives and agricultural businesses that already have relationships with farmers. The existing relationship matters. A new company can develop a measurement system far faster than it can manufacture local trust.

His description of Varaha’s process is full of patient work. Partners receive training. Teams collect data and soil samples. Satellite-based models help validate changes in practices. Scientific models quantify outcomes using local conditions. An audit and registry process stands between the project and an issued credit. Only then does the commercial transaction have its required foundation.

The scientific and social tasks sit beside each other. A buyer needs evidence that an outcome can be counted. A farmer needs a reason to participate. Jain has described returning the majority of credit-sale income to farmers in the regenerative agriculture model. That makes the farmer’s decision part of the economics, rather than a ceremonial photograph at the end.

There is also a useful distinction inside Varaha’s portfolio. Some agricultural changes reduce emissions; others remove carbon. Biochar, trees and weathering each involve different processes and timelines. Grouping them under one company does not make them interchangeable. The breadth gives Jain several routes into a farm’s opportunities, along with several sets of responsibilities to manage.

The buyer arrives with a calendar

In January 2025, Google announced an agreement to purchase 100,000 tons of biochar carbon removal from Varaha by 2030. Google also signed a separate 100,000-ton agreement with Charm. For Jain’s company, the commitment put an international buyer and a delivery horizon alongside work that starts with biomass.

That is an important change in the scale of the conversation. A founder can explain an opportunity in a meeting; a contract asks the organization to carry it forward over time. The removal must happen, its evidence must hold together, and deliveries must reach the buyer according to the agreement. A calendar is an unusually effective editor of ambition.

Varaha announced a Microsoft agreement in January 2026 for more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon removal over three years. Its stated plan uses cotton stalks from smallholder farms in Maharashtra, turning agricultural residue into biochar. Material left after growing a commercial crop becomes feedstock for a second commercial purpose.

For Jain, these agreements connect the agricultural world he knows to corporate demand for removal. The buyer’s name attracts attention, but the route back to the field is the revealing part. Gathering material, supporting operations and demonstrating outcomes are how the transaction acquires substance. His earlier experience with agricultural systems belongs inside this chapter, even when it is absent from the announcement’s headline.

The meeting that outgrew its slot

Jain tells a small story about Varaha’s introduction to WestBridge Capital. A conversation with co-founder and managing partner Sandeep Singhal was scheduled for 45 minutes. It became a two-and-a-half-hour discussion about carbon removal and Varaha’s potential. The diary had offered a slot. The subject required the afternoon.

By February 2026, Varaha had announced a $20 million first tranche of a planned $45 million Series B led by WestBridge, with participation from existing investors. The distinction between a first tranche and the full planned round matters. It describes the capital available at that point more accurately than a single large number could.

Alongside the financing came the Varaha Industrial Partners Program. The company’s proposed expansion involved industrial operators with gasification capability and access to sustainable biomass, supported by Varaha’s measurement, reporting, verification and credit origination. Announced projects included partners in India and a cashew producer in West Africa.

This gives Jain a different kind of organization to build. Supporting another operator requires a system that can travel beyond the company’s own projects. Training, monitoring and evidence have to remain useful in a partner’s hands. The founder who once built digital business verticals is again dealing with the question of how a working process becomes repeatable.

The capital story also includes Mirova’s November 2025 announcement of $30 million for Varaha’s regenerative agriculture project in India. Project investment and a company’s equity round serve different purposes. Together, they show why Jain’s business has to speak several financial languages while remaining understandable to the farmers whose participation gives it something to finance.

“Nature requires patience”Madhur Jain, reflecting on building Varaha

A camera, a field, a longer view

Away from the company, Jain is an avid wildlife photographer who grew up in the Himalayan foothills. He has joked about spending more on that pursuit than he would care to admit. It is a welcome detail in a career often described with acres, credits and funding rounds. Even a CEO’s spreadsheet must occasionally concede the argument to a camera.

Recognition has followed the company building. Jain became a Mulago fellow in 2023 and was named to TIME100 Climate in 2024. He also appeared in Milken Institute discussions about sustainable development finance and natural capital markets. Those settings brought his agricultural experience into conversations with investors and other people trying to design workable incentives.

In September 2026, Varaha won the Social Enterprise category at the Economic Times Startup Awards. Jain shared the recognition with the smallholder farmers the company works with. That response returns the story to its starting point: people making decisions on land, whose contribution needs to retain value as it moves through a much larger market.

The same month, Google named Varaha Climate among the Indian startups in the inaugural Google DeepMind Accelerator: AI for the Planet cohort. Measurement technology remains part of its development, alongside the relationships and operations that make the measurements possible. Jain’s next chapter continues to require both.

The shape of his career is unusually consistent. He has moved between agricultural engineering, management, advice, digital businesses and carbon projects while keeping farmers close to the centre of his work. Varaha gives that experience an international customer base. The leftovers after a harvest now enter a longer chain of decisions, and Jain’s job is to keep the links working.