Akanksha Barot · How I can help · Impact funds and investors
Impact funds and investors
Someone who can tell the difference between an install and a user, before the cheque clears.
Agri-tech diligence has a specific hazard: the metrics that are easiest to produce are the ones that mean least. Downloads, registered farmers, touchpoints and reach are all real numbers that can coexist with a product almost nobody uses twice. I have been on the inside of the reporting for nine years and I know which numbers a team can generate on demand and which ones they cannot fake.
Who this is for
Whether this page is about you.
- Impact funds and blended-finance investors with agri-tech or rural fintech in the pipeline.
- Funds whose portfolio company is missing its adoption targets and cannot say why.
- Investment committees who want the product read rather than the market read.
What usually goes wrong
Three problems I keep meeting.
- 01
Vanity metrics are structurally easy in this category
A farmer platform can report reach that is genuine and meaningless in the same breath. AgriCentral passed ten million downloads while I was running it, and the honest thing to say about that number is that the weekly retention curve was a different story and that is the one we managed to.
- 02
Impact metrics and the product roadmap point in different directions
The fund measures livelihood outcomes. The company measures activation. When nobody has done the work of connecting them, the roadmap optimises the thing the team can move and the impact report gets written separately, from different data, once a year.
- 03
Field verification is expensive and usually skipped
The claims that matter most are the ones only visible in a village: whether the agent is really visiting, whether the farmer opens it without prompting, whether anyone paid. This is answerable in days by someone who knows what to ask.
What backs it
Every claim names where it came from.
Owned the metrics on two farmer platforms at different stages, including the uncomfortable ones. Every figure on this site names the product and the role it came from, which is the same standard I would apply to a portfolio company.
AgriCentral 2018 to 2021, Jiva 2021 to 2025Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh through AgriCentral. Lampung and South Sumatra through Jiva. Enough range to know which problems are local and which are structural.
India and IndonesiaFifteen years in business, six of them in sales and business development before product, which is why unit economics and margin get the same scrutiny as retention.
BoostMySale, Healthspring, Antal International, 2010 to 2016Relevant here
The product streams this segment usually needs.
- Farmer advisory
Agronomy guidance a farmer acts on the same week, in the language and at the reading level they actually have. In AgriCentral that meant seven languages, activity schedules built from the crop and the sowing date, and a question channel answered by agronomists and by other farmers.
Source: AgriCentral, Head of Product 2018–2021, launched 31 December 2018. Jiva, Product Lead 2021–2025. - Agri e-commerce
Input sales to farmers who compare against the dealer they have borrowed from for fifteen years. Price intelligence is the other half: AgriCentral carried more than a hundred crops across roughly two thousand Indian markets.
Source: Jiva agri-ecommerce. AgriCentral Market View. Marketplace GTM across Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Snapdeal and ShopClues at BoostMySale. - Crop and produce procurement
Harvest purchase: quality capture, price agreement, weighment, and payment that lands when it was promised.
Source: Jiva, one of four core services on the direct-to-farmer platform. - Micro-financing
Credit that reaches a smallholder without an address, a credit file, or a spare afternoon.
Source: Jiva, one of four core services on the direct-to-farmer platform. - Leadership reporting
The internal view leadership actually steers on, rather than the deck assembled the night before the board call.
Source: Internal operations tooling at AgriCentral and Jiva. - Field agent management
Visit planning, sequencing, coordination and what each agent is accountable for by the end of the day.
Source: Jiva field coordination product, Indonesia. Roughly 30 percent field staff productivity gain.
How it runs
What working together looks like.
- 01
Product and technical diligence
What the product actually does, which numbers hold, what the roadmap implies about the team, and where the operating cost is hiding.
- 02
Field verification
Farmer and agent conversations in the market itself, against the claims in the data room.
- 03
Portfolio support after the investment
Working with a portfolio company’s product lead on the same problems, with the fund’s impact metrics as the anchor rather than an annexe.
Questions
Asked before, answered straight.
What would you look at first in a farmer-facing company?
Retention by cohort and by district, and how the company defines an active user. Then the delivery channel mix, because a platform whose advisory reaches farmers mostly by voice or by an agent has a completely different cost structure from one that assumes an app. Those two answers usually reframe the rest of the conversation.
How long does diligence take?
A desk read of the product and the metrics takes a few days. Adding field verification takes one to two weeks depending on how far apart the districts are. The field week is where the surprises are, and it is the part most often cut for time.
Can you tie a portfolio company’s roadmap to our impact metrics?
That is usually the most valuable piece. It means picking the small number of product outcomes that move the livelihood metric, instrumenting them properly, and then removing roadmap items that serve neither. The hard part is political rather than analytical, because it makes some work visibly optional.
Do you have a conflict if we are looking at a company adjacent to Olam?
Possibly, and I would rather raise it than discover it. Nine years inside Olam ventures means real adjacency in Indian and Indonesian smallholder markets. I would name any overlap before an engagement starts and decline where it is genuine.
What this record is, and what it is not
I have been the person on the other side of diligence rather than the person running it, for nine years and across two Olam ventures. That is the useful part. Someone who has produced these reports knows which numbers a portfolio company can generate on demand for a data room and which ones it cannot, because I have been asked for both.
Published elsewhere
- PodcastLearnings from 10M downloads with AgriCentral PM Akanksha BarotThe Crop Chronicles, by Jiva. Episode 5, 31 minutes
How AgriCentral reached ten million downloads, why the first year of adoption was slow, and what transferred to Indonesia.
- InterviewLessons from 10 million downloadsJiva, on Medium
The written version. Acquisition, the seven languages, and the interface decisions that came out of watching farmers hold a phone.