Farmdar, a Pakistani agritech startup, has raised $1.3 million in a seed round.
Farmdar creates usable data for farms and businesses by combining cutting-edge technology with high-resolution, multi-band satellite images. This information has a direct impact on farmers’ and businesses’ efficiency and profitability.
The Farmdar journey began when the founders started exporting produce and discovered that Pakistani produce was considered low quality in the UK and UAE markets. The Farmdar journey began in 2021 with childhood friends Muhammed Bukhari, Muzaffar Manghi, and Ibrahim Bokhari, who is himself a third-generation large farmer. The company’s founders committed to taking action.
“We began by focusing on supply chain enhancements, such as a cold chain, which allowed us to prolong shelf life while maintaining poor underlying quality.” We then experimented with remote sensing and precision agricultural technology, which resulted in a significant increase in quality and yield while lowering our input costs,” Ibrahim explained.
“Pakistan is one of the top ten producers of key crops like sugarcane, wheat, and rice in the world, yet we rank 50th or worse in terms of yield.” It’s a huge yield discrepancy. Farmdar is in a unique position to assist farmers in increasing output and quality while lowering expenses and eliminating waste. Pakistan is well-positioned to be a regional and global leader in agriculture. Data and knowledge that can be acted on properly and rapidly are the starting point for agricultural excellence. That’s when Farmdar enters the picture.” Manghi says this.
Agritech aims to create a food-secure world by empowering farmers in Pakistan with technology to obtain control over their produce and its true value in light of the world’s fast-rising population. Inherently, there is a human impact, therefore many data points for individual farmers, as well as registration on the Farmdar web app, will be free. Customized solutions and subscriptions will be offered to corporate farms, food processors, food corporations, and mills that want more detailed data and insight.
Farmdar’s data also aids in reducing the impact of agricultural activity on climate change by increasing output with waste and input reduction. Farmdar is Pakistan’s only agritech member of the Greentech Alliance.
“Using more land to grow more food isn’t the answer; it’s disastrous for climate change,” Muhammed says. “Farmdar creates data that helps maximize crop output by boosting yield, minimizing harvest loss and input costs, and monitoring diseases.” We understood how valuable this information was, but we were startled by the huge demand for it from both individual farmers and corporations. In Pakistan, accurate data on a large scale does not exist.”
Farmdar’s utilization of technology and remote sensing via satellites allows for scalable growth and matches with the company’s mission of solving the worldwide problem of agricultural sustainability. Farmdar will be able to use the funds to not just scale quickly across Pakistan and hire and develop the greatest digital talent, but also to adapt use cases developed in Pakistan to global markets such as Thailand, Turkey, Bangladesh, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the Middle East.
Image Credit: Farmdar
