Nutreco, a global animal nutrition and aquaculture company based in the Netherlands, has announced its investment in India’s dairy-tech startup Stellapps withthe aim to enable farmers to increase productivity and efficiency
According to Nutreco, India is the world’s largest dairy market with approximately 570 million litres of milk produced daily and their recent research indicates that the country’s dairy market is set to increase by 6% between 2021 and 2026. With two-thirds of dairy farmers being smallholder dairy farmers (with between two and five cows), India’s dairy market has a large sustainability footprint and there is significant room for improvement. India’s smallholder dairy farmers can avail of scientific innovations and digital solutions, which are crucial to enable farmers to increase productivity and efficiency in a sustainable way.
Nutreco said that farmers with smaller herd sizes often face barriers when seeking to grow their businesses sustainably, including challenges such as financial support, accessing high-quality products and services and expanding their customer base.
The latest funding round is a significant step forward to enabling Stellapps’ applications such as smartMoo and mooPay to solve challenges around the integration of modern technology into the high-volume dairy market. The technologies are farm to consumer dairy digitization services and will aim to provide access to farmers access services such as farm improvement, cattle nutrition, credit and insurance and to help them capitalise on the growing market while improving their sustainable farming methods with digital payments. Stellapps plans to deploy the funds to rapidly scale up its traceability network and extend its digital footprint across India.
Ranjith Mukundan, CEO of Stellapps, said, “We are on a mission to shift the Indian smallholder farmers into the agripreneur orbit by enhancing productivity, improving quality and enabling traceability through our smartMoo solutions.”
In 2020, Stellapps was one of the two Indian companies featured in the list of technology pioneers by the World Economic Forum.
Nutreco CEO Fulco van Lede commented, “The investment in Stellapps not only supports the farming industry to feed a growing global population in a more sustainable way, but also provides better prospects for smaller farmers.”
