Sateesh Nukala’s idea for a company began with an awkward childhood memory. Growing up in a farming family in Andhra Pradesh, he noticed children who did not take pride in their parents’ occupation. Years later, with a technology career behind him, that memory acquired a different weight. He wanted a farmer’s child to have a reason to say what their father did without embarrassment. It was an unusually personal starting point for a business that would sell seeds online.
There is a certain comedy in the route he took. Education and engineering helped him move away from the work he had grown up around. Professional success then gave him the means to look at that work again. The return would involve software, warehouses and investors, but the question underneath was familiar: could farming offer a better living, and with it a better standing?
The memory that followed him home
Nukala hails from Peddapasupula, a village in Andhra Pradesh’s Kadapa district. He studied at the National Institute of Technology Calicut, earning an MTech, and went on to work at Honeywell Technology Solutions. Public accounts of his career credit him with five patents. Before BigHaat, he had already spent years turning technical knowledge into products and systems.
In 2014, he left Honeywell. He took time to consider his next move, visited villages and spoke with farmers about the work between sowing and selling. Those conversations brought his professional experience back into contact with his family’s occupation. In 2015, he founded BigHaat with Sachin Nandwana and Kiran Vunnam, friends who also came from agricultural families.
He later recalled how hard it was to persuade people that rural customers would use technology in this way. Investors questioned the model. Some former Honeywell colleagues backed him, giving the venture early support. The first proposition was concrete enough to explain without a presentation: horticultural farmers could order quality seeds and have them delivered to their door.
The name carried the ambition. Haat means market; BigHaat suggested a larger place for farmers to buy and sell. It was a fairly economical name for a business whose eventual scope would become much less economical to describe. Seeds, guidance, logistics, produce buyers: the list grew as the founders encountered more of the farmer’s working day.
Trust arrived with a card machine
An early customer account supplies a useful picture of what this meant on the ground. Bhupinder Singh, a farmer in Punjab’s Jalandhar district, described BigHaat delivery workers arriving with card machines. After demonetization, he began paying by debit card. A digital transaction had acquired a very physical assistant: somebody standing at the door with the necessary equipment.
Singh also described finding treated seeds online for Rs 15,000, compared with Rs 17,500 for the untreated seeds he had previously bought. That was his experience of a particular purchase, rather than a promise about every product. The attraction was easy to understand. A farmer could compare an offer, receive a recognisable product and pay when it arrived.
In March 2017, BigHaat’s online payments were reported to have risen from 5 percent of transactions six months earlier to 30 percent. Nukala described a point-of-sale pilot in parts of Punjab where card machines handled almost 90 percent of transactions. Ordering online and paying digitally were separate steps, each requiring its own practical arrangement.
These details give the early business a useful texture. Rural commerce is sometimes discussed as though a smartphone settles the matter. Here, the phone was one participant in a longer exchange. The product, the explanation, the payment and the arrival all had to agree with one another. A checkout button has many virtues; it is a poor substitute for a delivery.
A shop that had to learn to listen
The next problem was the decision before the purchase. A farmer looking at a catalogue still needs to know what suits the crop and when to use it. BigHaat added advisory services and local agricultural expertise alongside commerce. By 2017, it was using audio and text messages in local languages during sowing, with experts meeting farmer groups in agricultural clusters.
Over two early financial years, the reported mix of orders reversed. In 2015-16, 30 percent were online and 70 percent offline; the following year, the proportions were 70 and 30. The company had an on-ground presence in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Rajasthan. The emerging pattern combined digital ordering with people who could help customers use it.
By 2021, Nukala was describing a product built through repeated feedback. Regional translation, payments and the underlying architecture received early attention. The company added crop guidance and a community where farmers could share and learn. Customers could reach it through an app or website, a missed call, or field staff where assistance was needed.
One commercial choice deserves attention. Nukala said the team wanted to introduce advisory without charging the small individual farmers who made up much of its customer base. It sought to build a large farmer audience and have manufacturers pay. The choice linked the usefulness of advice to the economics of reaching customers.
That creates a demanding job for the founder. Farmers need relevant guidance. Suppliers want distribution. A platform has to make those relationships work through the details of each crop and each order. The volume of a catalogue may impress a buyer at first glance. The recommendation that proves useful gives that buyer a reason to return.
- 01Choose inputsSeeds, nutrition and equipment
- 02Get guidanceAdvice through digital and assisted access
- 03Find buyersMarket links for harvested produce
Growing the company, sharing the work
Investment followed the early experiments. In August 2020, BigHaat raised just over $2 million in a pre-Series A round led by Japan’s Beyond Next Ventures. Ankur Capital, Rockstud Capital and angel investors also participated. The money was intended to strengthen the team and technology and extend the company’s services geographically.
In January 2022 came a Rs 100 crore round led by JM Financial Private Equity, with Beyond Next Ventures participating again. At that point, BigHaat was reported to serve input needs across more than 13,000 postal codes, with over 700,000 farmers engaging monthly. Expansion had become a matter of repeated operations across a wide map.
The staffing announcements that year make that change visible. Jitesh Shah joined as chief operating officer after serving as chief revenue officer at Cropin. Later, BigHaat added Vishaal S. Wadhwani in finance, Richa Hukumchand in data sciences and analytics, and Indronil Ghosh in supply chain management. The business needed people responsible for the machinery behind growth.
Finance, data and logistics do not sound especially romantic. For somebody waiting to sow, logistics can be the most interesting department in the building. These appointments brought specialist responsibilities into a company that had once worked from a tiny Bengaluru room. Nukala had shared that early-office recollection on LinkedIn when the team moved into larger premises in JP Nagar.
“In building a strong team, behavior is more important than performance.”
Sateesh Nukala · 2024
His management philosophy gives the expansion a personal dimension. He has emphasised integrity, teamwork and innovation, and said that cultural misalignment can justify letting somebody go. He prefers a durable team culture to dependence on individual heroes. It is a telling preference for a founder whose business has so many points at which another person must do their part.
There is a connection here with the original farming question. A company promising farmers more dependable choices has to organise dependable work internally. Technical invention matters, but so do the handovers. An advisor, warehouse worker and delivery partner each carry a piece of the same promise, even when they never appear together in a photograph.
The other end of the harvest
BigHaat’s work began to extend to the sale of crops. In 2021, Nukala described procurement of red chillies, maize, turmeric and paddy in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for corporate buyers including ITC and Suguna. Helping a farmer purchase an input had opened a relationship that could continue when the crop was ready to leave the farm.
In February 2026, BigHaat announced $10 million in fresh funding led by Bidra Innovation Ventures, the venture arm of OCP Group, with JM Financial and Ashish Kacholia participating. The proposed use of the investment included expanding the farmer platform and building a traceable agricultural value chain. The relationship also connected BigHaat with OCP’s plant-nutrition business.
Nukala described plans to grow in India and enter markets in Africa and Southeast Asia, with spices an initial focus in Africa. Through AgroHaat, the company was building links between growers and institutional buyers of grains, pulses and spices. His stated target was $1 billion in annual revenue within five years. He also described BigHaat as close to EBITDA breakeven, with full profitability expected during 2026.
Led by Bidra Innovation Ventures, with JM Financial and Ashish Kacholia participating.
The targets belong to the future. The underlying direction is already visible: a business that began with products entering farms is working on produce leaving them. For Nukala, the long return to agriculture now involves markets far beyond the village. Its most personal test remains close to home: whether farming can become work that the next generation has good reason to value.