“We were in Delhi in 2014, for a board meeting and someone had told us that Anil Kumar was going entrepreneurial. So we called him up and asked him to tell us what plans he had for Samunnati. Incidentally he was going to be in Bangalore a few days later, and things kind of took off from there.”
“When Anil came to us with his investment idea, it was a branch led, agri lending model. After we invested, 6 months later, Anil came with the idea of a pivoting to an FPO focused model. He had booked a 2 hour time slot to convince us. It got done in 10 mins because we already knew the pivot was needed and were waiting for him to arrive at a similar conclusion ‘ground up’.”
“At Elevar, our agriculture thesis is premised on an understanding that farmers are producers and not traders, and yet their livelihoods are based on their ability to trade their produce. This was intuitive to Anil.”