Cold Chain Money Pours Into Indian Agriculture, Farm Data Stays Thin

India’s farm data software layer is the smallest line on the capex sheet at most Indian agribusinesses, and the cold chain build is happening on top of it. KhetiBuddy’s rebrand to Verdnt lands as a formal product launch of that missing layer, with pilots already running in Canada and the United States.

Cold Chain Capital Floods Into Indian Agriculture

India’s cold chain market was worth ₹2,28,700 crore in 2024 and is forecast to grow at a 10.86% CAGR through 2033, per IMARC Group figures cited by the India Brand Equity Foundation. The growth has been driven less by private capital than by a wave of central schemes that have made temperature-controlled infrastructure cheap to build.

India’s cold storage base now runs to 8,689 facilities with 39.6 million metric tonnes of capacity, as of August 2024 per Indian Infrastructure data quoted by IBEF. Uttar Pradesh holds the largest share at 38%, followed by West Bengal at 15% and Gujarat at 10%. The Ministry of Food Processing Industries has approved 400 cold chain projects in total, of which 293 were completed by FY24 and 107 were under implementation, with the current capacity from completed projects at 8.59 lakh metric tonnes and the expected total after all approved projects complete at 10.28 lakh metric tonnes. Beyond the cold rooms, the wider infrastructure is rolling out: 1,482 reefer vehicles have been completed under scheme projects, individual quick freezing capacity has reached 274.25 MT per hour, and 137.53 lakh litres of milk are processed and stored each day under the same programme. That is the physical layer being built, and the numbers behind it sit on the cold-chain size, capacity and project pipeline in India.

Government money is the quiet engine behind the rollout. The Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sampada Yojana approved 1,217 projects between 2017 and 2025 at a total project cost of Rs. 8,698 crore. Of those, 651 projects have been completed.

The Agriculture Infrastructure Fund has sanctioned Rs. 67,717 crore in loans as of 2024, mostly for cold stores, ripening chambers, sorting and grading lines, and refrigerated transport. Cold chain access can lift farmer incomes by 15-20%, per a NABARD study cited by IBEF. Yet the post-harvest losses India still absorbs each year are estimated at Rs. 92,651 crore, a sum that makes the rest of the build-out look like the cost of catching up, not getting ahead.

Here is the gap that does not show up in any of those numbers. Procurement officers in FMCG and food processing still sign off on a Rs. 50 crore cold chain expansion with detailed cost sheets, and they still cannot answer the simplest question about the season feeding that chain: what yield to expect from the contracted acres, what varieties are in the ground, when each block was sown. The answers come from field-agent phone calls, rough estimates, and institutional memory. They do not come from a structured farm record, because the farm record rarely exists in a form the boardroom can query. The PMKSY, the AIF, and the cold chain capacity build have all operated on the assumption that physical infrastructure is the bottleneck. For a large slice of Indian agribusiness today, that assumption no longer holds.

The Layer Above the Cold Chain

The farm data layer sits above the cold chain, above the pack house, above the procurement spreadsheet. It is the structured record of what happened on each farm block: sowing date, seed variety, weather, soil test, input schedule, irrigation events, harvest quality, residue compliance. When that record is continuous and queryable, every downstream decision sharpens. When it is missing or stitched together from memory, the procurement officer is left guessing in the same room as the cold chain vendor. Most Indian agribusinesses still sit on the second side of that line.

Vinay Nair, the co-founder and chief executive of Pune-based KhetiBuddy, made the case bluntly in an essay published on June 27, 2026. Farm data is the most underused asset in Indian agriculture, he wrote, ahead of land, labour, and capital. Procurement pricing, contract farming terms, sustainability disclosures, and export readiness all flow from what an agribusiness actually knows at the farm level. Companies that own their farm data layer today will own their supply chain tomorrow. Companies that outsource farm intelligence to middlemen, field agents, and institutional memory will keep making hundred-crore decisions on zero structured information. The argument lands because the cold chain build is exposing it in real time: every new reefer truck that rolls out is a louder echo of the data layer underneath it.

KhetiBuddy Becomes Verdnt

KhetiBuddy has rebranded to Verdnt. The new name is a softer wrapper for a harder product pitch: a unified enterprise data layer for agri-food companies that ties farm operations to procurement, quality, traceability, ESG reporting, and the boardroom. The rebrand was shaped by two years of stakeholder work in North America, per the company, and pilots are already running in Canada and the United States.

The platform’s founder framed the change as a commitment to turn fragmented farm data into enterprise-grade insights. Dev Das, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Verdnt, said the rebrand was the result of feedback gathered from North American customers over the past two years.

Verdnt is the culmination of almost two years of engaging with North American stakeholders and potential customers, leveraging critical insights and incorporating their feedback into making our platform even more powerful, yet locally relevant.

The new platform integrates data from across the crop cycle, from tractors and sensors to satellites and weather stations. Its positioning spans farm management, supply chain tracking, and sustainability data, areas that agribusiness CFOs have largely treated as separate software categories. The announcement sits at the Verdnt rebrand announcement and North American pilots.

KhetiBuddy was founded in 2021 in Pune by Vinay Nair and Richa Pawar Nair after the two discovered, while selling natural fertilisers to farmers in Maharashtra, that critical farm decisions were being made without accessible, reliable on-ground data. The company is bootstrapped and has been commercially active since early 2023, with revenue growing 50-60% between its first and second year and 100% client retention from its 2023 cohort. It now runs a 42-member team that manages global deployments remotely from India via cloud infrastructure, with local project managers in the markets it enters.

In early 2026 the company also launched Verdnt as an upgraded, enterprise-facing version of the KhetiBuddy platform, integrating farm and supply chain data for better decision-making across growth, compliance, and sustainability. The upgrade added features such as weather alerts, satellite-based crop monitoring, and photo-based pest identification. Vinay Nair has described the shift as evolving farm digitisation into an AI-native intelligence layer over the next decade.

What 200,000 Acres of Farm Data Already Show

KhetiBuddy’s platform, now marketed as Verdnt, has digitised over 200,000 acres across India and now serves more than 35 agribusiness clients. It runs as a web console for enterprise teams plus two mobile apps, one for farmers and another for field officers, with real-time data capture from the farm edge. The footprint gives the company a farm-level dataset that procurement teams, certification bodies, and sustainability auditors have struggled to assemble on their own. Two Indian outlets lay the scope out in detail: KhetiBuddy’s farm-level digitisation footprint and KhetiBuddy’s client roster, modules and revenue growth. For clients like Himalaya Wellness, the platform also ties into procurement, traceability, and export paperwork workflows.

The product is built around four modules, all running on a shared farm data layer. The farm management module logs the crop cycle from sowing to harvest, capturing planting dates, soil tests, weather updates, satellite imagery, and sensor data. The same record feeds supply chain traceability, operations and ERP, and a sustainability and compliance module that handles carbon footprint reporting and export paperwork.

Reported client outcomes are concrete. Businesses using the farm management module report 15-20% higher crop yields alongside comparable cost savings. Godfrey Phillips has cut compliance time by 30-40% by replacing manual documentation with automated reporting. Himalaya Wellness uses the platform to manage its medicinal crop farms.

The platform sits on Java and React for web, React Native for iOS and Android, and runs on AWS and Azure cloud infrastructure. Each enterprise operates in a logically isolated environment with role-based access, audit trails, and data governance. Client data is encrypted, isolated, and fully owned by the client. Outside the commercial work, KhetiBuddy has partnered with the Maharashtra state government and the World Bank on a regenerative agriculture project, helping farmers understand the value of data inside sustainability programmes and carbon credit systems. The mix of enterprise SaaS, government partnership, and global pilots marks a rare footprint for an Indian agri-tech company of its size.

India remains KhetiBuddy’s primary market. The company has entered Europe with a client in France, and expansion into the Middle East and Africa is next. Vinay Nair has framed the global push around an Indian advantage: software built for fragmented landholdings, dozens of crops, multiple agro-climatic zones, and dozens of languages has been stress-tested against a complexity that platforms designed for a 10,000-acre US Midwest farm have not yet had to handle.

A Global Software Market Quietly Doubles

The global farm management software market was valued at $4.18 billion in 2024, per Grand View Research data cited by YourStory. The market is projected to reach $10.58 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 17.3% from 2025 to 2030. The size of that doubling is not visible in most coverage of Indian agriculture, because Indian agribusiness still spends the bulk of its digital budget on ERP, procurement, and the back office. The farm data layer is the slice of that market Indian operators have been slowest to claim.

KhetiBuddy sits in this category alongside Indian players such as CropIn and international platforms such as Agrivi and Agworld. Differentiation in the segment is shifting from feature checklists to data quality and integration depth. The platforms that win will be the ones that turn fragmented farm activity into auditable, queryable records the procurement and compliance teams can act on.

The forecast matters because the buyers in the segment are changing. Two years ago, farm management software was sold primarily to agronomy teams at large agribusinesses. Now sustainability, supply chain, and digital teams are pulling the same purchase forward, and export compliance is the trigger in many of those deals. Verdnt’s positioning as a single platform for farm data, supply chain, and ESG reporting lines up with that shift. The category is also being pulled into carbon programmes and regenerative agriculture projects, where the value of data is sold to farmers in sustainability programmes and carbon credit systems.

• Global farm management software market: $4.18 billion in 2024
• Projected 2030 market size: $10.58 billion
• Forecast CAGR 2025-2030: 17.3%
• Source: Grand View Research

Where India Holds an Edge Nobody Markets

Indian agriculture is a harder problem to build software for than the textbook Western case. Landholdings are fragmented, often below two hectares, and spread across many crops within a single district. Agro-climatic zones shift over short distances, and farming practices vary by language and region. A platform designed for a 10,000-acre US Midwest corn operation has rarely been stress-tested against that mix.

KhetiBuddy’s product has had to be. Vinay Nair described the difference to ETV Bharat in February: labour availability in India allows more data-entry-centric systems, whereas in developed countries with large mechanised farms, data capture relies more on integration with machinery and automated systems. Both models have to converge eventually, and the platform has had to handle connectivity gaps, offline-first use, and the habit change required to get field officers and farmers inputting records consistently. The platform’s mobile-first architecture, with one app for farmers and another for field officers, exists because pencil-and-paper registers were the baseline it had to replace. Software built in India for that reality has been hardened in ways that translate to the harder geographies Western markets are now entering.

The same complexity is now showing up in Western markets as they expand into frontier geographies. Buyers in Canada, the United States, and Europe are starting to ask the questions their Indian counterparts asked years earlier, per Vinay Nair’s June 27 essay. Carbon traceability, sustainability reporting for institutional buyers, and farm-to-factory logistics planning are no longer optional features in those markets either. Software built in India for the harder problem sits closer to the harder problem those buyers are now walking into, and Indian platforms built for it are running pilots in those markets.

The opportunity flows in both directions, as the CEO has framed it. India can learn investment rigour and long-term thinking around farm data infrastructure from global markets. Global markets can adopt what India has already built out of necessity, software that bends to real-world agricultural complexity without breaking.

What the Boardroom Will Buy Next

The cold chain boom will not decide who leads the next phase of Indian agribusiness. The boardroom decision that will is whether farm data sits on the balance sheet as a strategic asset or stays buried in field-agent notebooks. Three procurement shifts will define that call.

1. Treat farm data as a structured balance-sheet asset, not a free byproduct of operations.
2. Tag farm-level data to procurement pricing, contract farming terms, and export traceability requirements.
3. Move sustainability and carbon disclosures onto the same data layer used for compliance, not a separate audit.

Each of those shifts changes who owns the farm data question inside an agribusiness. Today the agronomy team carries it, and the next budgeting cycle is more likely to put it with the chief procurement officer or the chief sustainability officer. The software vendors that win will be the ones handing those roles a queryable record.

KhetiBuddy, now Verdnt, is one of a handful of vendors positioning for that shift, and the rebrand is a signal of how seriously the company is taking the export of the category. Vinay Nair has said the next decade’s work is to evolve farm digitisation into an AI-native intelligence layer that helps enterprises predict risks, verify sustainability, and build resilient, traceable food systems. The cold chain boom will keep attracting capital. The farm data layer is where the next round of boardroom spend is going to land.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does KhetiBuddy do, and what changed with the Verdnt rebrand?

KhetiBuddy is a Pune-based farm data software platform founded in 2021 by Vinay Nair and Richa Pawar Nair. It runs four modules: farm management, supply chain traceability, operations and ERP, and sustainability and compliance. The company has rebranded to Verdnt and rolled out an enterprise-facing upgrade that integrates farm and supply chain data for procurement, quality, traceability, and ESG reporting.

How big is the farm management software market globally?

The global farm management software market is on track to grow from $4.18 billion in 2024 to $10.58 billion by 2030 at a 17.3% CAGR, per Grand View Research. Indian agribusinesses are now showing up in the segment’s customer rosters, but most of the spending growth is happening outside India.

Why is farm data software called the ‘invisible layer’ in Indian agribusiness?

The phrase comes from Vinay Nair, the co-founder and chief executive of Verdnt, who described farm data in a June 27, 2026 essay as the most underused asset in Indian agriculture, ahead of land, labour, and capital. The ‘invisible’ framing reflects that agribusiness CFOs tend to sign off large sums on cold chain and processing capacity without being able to query a structured record of what is happening on the contracted farms feeding those investments.

How does farm data software actually reduce post-harvest losses?

India absorbs about Rs. 92,651 crore in post-harvest losses each year, per Global Agriculture figures cited by IBEF, even after a decade of cold chain investment. NABARD has estimated that cold chain access alone can lift farmer incomes by 15-20%, but the data layer is what makes the physical infrastructure auditable: procurement teams can plan around an accurate record, certification bodies can verify sustainability claims, and export compliance can run on the same data instead of a manual rebuild.

Who founded KhetiBuddy, and where does it operate now?

KhetiBuddy was founded in 2021 in Pune by Vinay Nair and Richa Pawar Nair. The bootstrapped company now runs a 42-member team, serves more than 35 clients including Godfrey Phillips and Himalaya Wellness, and has pilots in Canada, the United States, and France, with the Middle East and Africa next on the expansion list.