so let's start the session uh everybody ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for joining uh on this webinar uh on a thursday afternoon i'm sure we are all uh waiting to get back on our holiday for holi and so many things but before that uh we wanted to just have a quick webinar uh with a lot of more series to come with tracer's technologies we'll sure talk about more about the company so on so forth but today um it's my pleasure to invite um two guests um or also the founders of tracex uh on for the webinar i will take this privilege inviting srivats rashford was wrong and anil nadine on the webinar so i'll give a quick introduction though i've known them uh personally for you know more than one and a half years now but just just what has happened in their life before i met them so i'll start with srivitsa uh shrutsa is an academically an electrical engineer and an alumnus of i am bangalore he is passionate about building technology solutions for social good over his 18 years of experience he has led many initiatives around software product management engineering solution sales in both enterprise software corporations and startups in agriculture food and education previously he was also associated with software companies such as robert bosch talisma and logica anin nadik who's also the founder of tracex technologies he's an electronics and communication engineer worked in the iit industry for 18 plus years with companies like infosys british telecom isis he also runs an ngo focused on urban rooftop farming and is a part of a community farm growing food sustainably he is very passionate about safe food farming and making an impact in the agricultural ecosystem so and this is uh you guys both of you have very similar backgrounds uh technically both are engineers both have worked in big corporate names like we we saw uh i would like to pose this question very important question that i think audience also wants to know is why tracex right so uh what i mean both of you can answer taking turns maybe she would say you can go first and then you can add on over to you well thanks manu by the way thanks so much everyone who has uh participated in the event today uh really appreciate your time i know thanks for a um very generous and kind introduction uh coming back to a quick question i'll just take it very shortly and let anil uh expand on it because it just goes back to uh what happened when i mean i came together back in 2016 that i would say is the uh i would say that led to what you've actually eventually ended up building here at tracex uh but yeah the whole idea about racex uh is something that we uh got to learn uh from our earlier uh agri-tech startup uh jiva boom in which uh expand uh the the we people as practitioners of agriculture not as someone who she was sorry to interrupt your breaking up uh maybe i mean if you want to just uh join intel okay let me see if yeah let me see if i can switch over my internet and maybe you can go ahead uh during while i do that let me see if i can switch over mine too yeah [Music] great uh thanks uh manu for the introduction and you know welcome everybody and this will be probably the first of many attractions we are likely to have as founders here and also as as an organization uh you know for me personally the the passion to create a connected chain uh create transparency and enable uh ultimately the trust has been a very important part of my life journey when i you know was going through my corporate life and then i realized when we had our first child we realized there's a lot of gap in terms of what we are as as family eating we didn't really know where our food was coming from was it it was safe to consume and so on and that journey really led me to understand a little more deeper into the agree and food ecosystems and that's where i started off with the with the non-profit trying to learn to do urban farming mostly on your rooftop and your balcony and garden city farmers was a non-profit which kind of which had a very deep profound impact on my life along with dr vishnath and dr rajendra who her partners in that field john hanson created a community around that and to be very thankful for that because that's where i met sri as well in one of the events and he was coming in to learn about gardening he's also very passionate environmentalist photographer and great swimmer so that's where you know we got to connect and learn a lot about each other and the passion and that led to starting off jivo bhumi as a community supported agriculture initiative connecting farmers and consumers and tech was always part of the puzzle in in a way but we didn't really know on day one what tech to build that's where we spend a lot of effort and understanding the ecosystem and ultimately that led to us being able to create a technology platform that we see today as tracex so i'll pass here and let's re-take over from where he left off so thanks yeah you you said it right i think when anil and i met a few years ago i think back in 2015 we both first thought when it comes to technology and agriculture it's only it's only you know weather stations and satellites and so on and so forth that is what we we in fact i remember both of us even put together a slide which talks about many of those devices that's what we thought was always that but but then as he said our own learnings from being practitioners of agriculture which is which is through uh jivabumi we realized there's a larger problem in the supply chain which fundamentally started with digitization of supply chains and then um a sort of a traceability became um a precursor to uh or rather digitization was a precursor to traceability so uh therefore we both uh did a lot of experiments so that that's that's where we both had a new advantage of testing the waters even before we decided to build what we built here at tracex through our earlier um gig we both were able to take create consumer products get to the market directly talk to the customers talk to them about what excites them in in when it comes to consuming safe food all of it came back to the fact that look people would definitely want to understand how safe the food that they consume and eventually we um also got a a grant from government of karnataka so we're grateful to them uh for uh trusting our story and eventually that was the beginning of uh trey sex yeah so basically i have promised the audience who are coming here today that we'll be more candid and uh uh i know and transparent about things so i want to ask one more i want to i'm interesting question here is was there one moment let's say when you when you started yeah was there something that triggered that one incident that you remember that yes this is something that i have to change i have to bring in a stream of good quality food and this is the only way that i can do by starting a company so can you talk a little bit of jibabumi genesis and what was the trigger for you to start something like yeah i can go first maybe and she can follow on and see here when we were running the non-profit the garden city farmers initiative it was a community-led effort and a lot of people were very passionate about knowing where the food comes from are really passionate about growing their own food as the community became larger bigger we started organizing a lot of farmer markets and that also triggered an interest to get food beyond your own rooftop you know from trusted parties that you could get access to safe food and but the challenge was always to get the farmers to come to the market and many of the farmers that we were working with at that time or we had introductions were growing great food but the big challenge they had was accessibility as in they were there to come from very far off distances most of them were smallholder farmers so it was not viable to operate on a farm or market model uh but then we realized that there is a lot of interest in that and that's where we took the leap to see can we create a simple connected platform where we can list the products from the farmers do all the processing we started off with a very very tiny warehouse to in being able to deliver and we used to deliver once a month when we started off and then slowly that became a next day delivery eventually but uh i think that's kind of triggered the community really helped us take that leap forward yeah yeah just a point on uh monthly delivery that brings a smile on our face and i'm sure because on the way back from our offices we both were still employed we were doing our day job when we actually started piloting uh diva boomi when ziva bhumi was not called right those those are the days that we were talking about so we would carry um the the bags back to our office on the way back we would visit all the customers and deliver it to them and we would spend like hours and hours sitting together with uh customers they all became a good friend at the end of the day talking about our own uh uh you know uh journeys and and and how do we ensure that the food that we're bringing to them is safe and all of that stuff so when initially when when people knew anil and shiva it was all good but when we went into mass market that's when a lot of folks came back and then said look why should how how should i uh uh you know trust or why should i trust uh the product itself right so which is when the whole idea about traceability sort of came together for us to build digitization and flexibility great i think uh this this uh comes to a point where you talked about the hardships right so my next question was about that so now we will fast forward few years and we'll come back to we'll come to tracex now when you started off 36 and to where you are today i mean maybe the more than two years have passed i want to really know uh what were the ups and downs i mean i'm sure it has been a rollercoaster ride for both of you mostly the the the downs i think ups i think all of us can see it it could be on media it will be in the paper mostly what was the hardship what was most difficult about building a technology for agritech ecosystem in india what was the what was those critical point that you would want expand on it if you if you look at our journey from a transition from uh jiva bhumi to tracex the idea obviously originated from there and we started building uh putting together what we called back then as as mvp but if you see the team we could not bring all the team members from there because it's a very different type of business right give me the commodity business and tracex is a technology business and by the way when we built uh a trace access product food sign we thought we were going to actually leverage a food sign to you know scale uh the earlier uh business but uh in when we had our first mvp of the of the product which came out in in about eight to ten months time we realized that we were not just solving vivoboomy's own problem we had magically somehow had been you know we started solving the entire ecosystems of supply chains problem which is the whole idea of the tracex uh came together right so uh the the point uh is is that uh it started off as as an initiative solving our own uh problems back then uh but eventually uh scale to solving uh uh the larger uh problems that's how uh it all uh sort of came together and and biggest thing was um the team so because of the nature of the business we need a different uh set of uh team members and what we are very proud of in both organizations is the team that has been built so our initial stages a capitalism is definitely a problem which are solved through grants that we got so we are reasonably experts at attracting banks now then uh initial tech businesses require you to pump in that initial uh a fund right to build a small team we're grateful to some of our uh folks that have been in our team they still continue to be in our team uh uh who came in as this as their first job it's been three years for them we've had a great uh relationship with these folks they are co-creators i would say with what we've built though it was something anil and i started looking at the first login screen how would it look like uh to where the product is with 35 plus customers that are using the application i would say the team uh initially that came together we were lucky enough to have some of those amazing folks uh and and very first one and a half years it was a very small team that built it and now in the last year and slightly over a year we've uh we've grown so initially i would say that was our uh building the early teams and and recently building the founder minus teams as we called i think uh uh uh was was the biggest uh challenge i would i would say the products would would come together when you have the team analysis that you uh add on to yeah i think see the journey is to be able to believe in that you know believe in that vision and the mission and there were a lot of hard days obviously where we had a lot of conflicting ideas coming onto the table uh you know what should not be doing versus where the industry is headed where the opportunities are opening up and so on where we kind of stuck to the balance that you know we we wanted to use tech and a lot of questions around why blockchain and why not something else and so there will always be questions about what you can and cannot do but it's very important to keep that uh cut instinct or the trust and you know focus on that and i think that's what we did and it's been an amazing journey since then yeah you're on mute uh yeah i'm on mute sorry so uh now from from there from the time it started i just want to understand uh what is the current state in terms of number of people number of customers and a number of farmers that you're working with uh however it is so can you put a number to these so that we know uh how we have grown over the last uh uh two years of germany so uh srivatsam sure when we started i would say on day one it was an inline anil and me uh i would call day three as almost five four four first actually uh uh uh in the team uh then uh the entire 2019 was just about trying to understand what to build uh how to build uh with with a lot of constraints that you have both on on human resources and and as well as on the funds that we had right so it was a very very small team sub four team members in 2019 2020 we were about seven of us um and only thing that we had during kovid was we we didn't have any any customers that were banging on our head and then saying look where is the deliverable right so we had very little very very few customers we had actually about five if i'm not mistaken uh back in 2020 which is when we reinvented the product i would say first uh nine months of which typically must happen in any startup right so first nine months nine to twelve months was about building the mvp and the next uh about uh eight months i would say was actually fine-tuning mvp and not hesitating to re-architect if it if it was required and that's what we did in the in the 2020 entire of 2020 so grateful to the team again that relentlessly put together a solid work from 2021 we ended probably 2020 with about uh eight customers who are not mistaken we began year 2021 with about 11 of them because i remember in the first week itself and i were discussing of 2021 we had three uh agreements that we closed we ended 2021 with 30 customers currently about 34 customers we are a team of 27 with four more uh who are scheduled to join very soon and the biggest asset that we have is the team and and it looks very complete across different uh divisions including the leadership the second level leadership the early joiners that we we're very excited to work with you know fresh graduates both in agriculture as well as technology streams all of all of us coming together that's our number so fantastic i think now we've known the journey and we know uh we've gone to uh so many number of customers that you just mentioned but i think the for the audience would want to know uh who who are tresek's customers and what is the value that we want to drive so you talked about current supply chain you talked about the number of customers now really deep diving into who's your customer and what is the value that you would want to uh you know derive for this customer so and then you want to yeah great uh see the i'll just start on from where uh she left in terms of the customers just switching back a couple of years ago there were some certain pivotal movements right where we really you know one of the early customers we signed on was mtr who trusted us on creating a connected supply chain to you know create traceable uh chilis for their entire for the factory production and that was a very important point for us because then we could really see that the application now having a broader impact than just uh what we were trying to build for ourselves internally and then slowly that confidence and moved on and we have a broad set of customers covering a lot of value change the customers tend to be agribusinesses we help them with multiple parts one is we help them with digitization which ensures that the production activities the processing activities get digitized then we work uh with their supply chain partners to bring them on to ensure we have a connected supply chain and ultimately what that leads to is end-to-end connect one connected supply chain and being able to validate the credibility of the claims across the entire network and we are also building uh the network model where we are able to now with the connected supply chain be able to bring on more participants on the network and be able to scale that impact that we do across everything so many of the values we work with fruits and vegetables for example field crops like maize and paddy uh you know basmati paddy in you know spices coffee tea cocoa dairy seafood meat poultry and seed value chains and these are value chains and our platform is very flexible in order to be able to handle that and many of the customers that we are working with the mtr foods or lambs and you know customers who are industry leaders who've taken a big leap in terms of uh taking the solution on and adopting it uh so one side is a production ecosystem where we have companies like green at fresh produce who do a lot of hardcore production and olam and so on then we have on the other end direct to consumer customers uh you know who use our platform to showcase the transparency and trust to their customers like slay coffee uh tim yours and and blutakai and so on and we also work with governments you know very large programs working with government of telangana on see traceability and so on so i'll pass here and we'll take on more as we go forward so uh i have i mean this is a very intriguing point because i mean you have built a platform uh i understand your actual background and now you're also mentioning that you have diversified into different value chains and so the question here is to shiver itself probably you can take it in terms of let's say how was it how was it i mean was it easy was it difficult to jump between the value chains because it's something that you have not experienced yourself in the past and and what was the learnings and do you think this platform can be used to trace uh any value chain or any food product so think can you throw some light on that absolutely so right from the day one um what we looked at uh is food as a horizontal more as just vertical right so we we were when you're building tech that's how we thought is the right way to look at the entire ecosystem because both anil and i come from building enterprise technology products so that's how we looked at it while the initial set of mvps initiative customers all came from four agriculture uh products it could be party mains or fruits and vegetables but very quickly we were able to repurpose the same system for capturing uh the other other ecosystems i would again you know thank our customers for giving us the opportunity to understand obviously these supply chains are very different right but there is a product always a product in agriculture supply chain can be uh uh can be could be fatty in other supply chain it is probably a poultry it's an egg it's it's it's dairy but product is product it has a story to say product has an origin product has has has uh uh uh you know it goes through processing it goes through production all of that is and that's how we were able to build a generic platform that can address food horizontally today we we we we like anil said we have we are in lot more uh value chains but it's the same product right which which can fit into multiple workflows depending on the value chain that's the capability i would say the strongest capability that we built in the product is how the product can fit into multiple uh value chains and and now that we are on the product now i have a very interesting question i think a lot of people also want to know this and why blockchain why did you come up with a technology on blockchain so what was your thought process behind it and why do you think blockchain the technology is better for a solution like this and can you elaborate more than that yeah just a couple of minutes i'll talk about and let anil expand on that further so fundamentally if you look at the authentic information about the food or traceability or whatever we may call right that has been missing so there has been digitized i mean to a large extent i would say ever since there have been this erp system the digitization in some form or the other has been there the traceability has always been uh restricted to the fact that you know batch number or you know serial number and stuff like that right i would say there are two reasons um uh one is obviously the business reason the second one is the technology benefits therefore blocked in business reason simply is the historically the supply chains have been working in isolation supply chains were never connected the suppliers are not digitally connected that's what that's what we mean so our fundamental objective was to create a network not to create another tech platform another product which will work in isolation from the rest of the world our objective right from the day one was to build a platform take a platform approach where you can onboard multiple customers who willingly come on to support a cause on a network like this put a negative for food and agree industry that was our fundamental thinking even before we started building the first version of the product therefore natural choice was blockchain because you're trying to build multiple participants from the complex agreement food supply chain you're trying to build a connected supplier like i said no point in building a isolated independent system which was in this parade uh situation then the next uh thing that we looked at when uh believing that technology like blockchain is the right thing because of several uh benefits that it offers it could be decentralization fundamentally so it is a network but yet decentralized network not one single person covering it right so it could be distribution of the access rights that everyone has it could be uh the security that it offers in terms of the encryption that it can bring to the uh uh data and immutability of the data so data the moment something goes on a network naturally everyone is is scared about how secure the data is and nothing less than i mean nothing like a blockchain implementation there that will give us that uh flexibility and moving on obviously where we are exploring different use cases on uh you know tokenization and building that open economy uh liberating blockchains which will probably talk about it in a while but i'll pause there and let and i'll add on to these uh more points yeah i'll quickly take a minute and see as has already covered i think from a platform perspective we kind of very focused on bringing technology for the future not technology from the past right so blockchain is really a technology that lays the foundation for web 3.0 lays the foundation for tokenization list the foundation for decentralization these are very very critical for building the future-proof organization and and there were very few examples to look forward to so we had to we were kind of pioneers in that space looking to solve a lot of uh you know very critical uh challenges around all of that stuff so it took a lot of effort to push the boundaries in many cases we had like very good support from aws for example in early days to you know help us uh with a lot of the architectural scalable decisions building a sas based platform right from day one so all of that laid the foundation very well and ultimately led to liberating blockchain at the right uh per person spirit yeah i think that's good to know i think we've got an insight into why blockchain now i think we've talked about the customers we talked about what happened in the past now i think we are stepping into the future where i want to talk to you about what is your scalar plan uh what i mean are we restricting ourselves with tracex to india are we trying to scale abroad and what are the opportunities that we are looking at when we are trying to uh scale and what is the go to market strategy uh as well so i think a little bit of uh insight onto that animal and maybe sure yeah great so see right from day one we've been thinking of building a global organization right so our thought process of product construct our team and our thinking has been global so that way uh we very consciously making that effort to make sure that everything that we are doing is relevant in the global context uh so in that sense uh now we have a international sales team a lot of our focus is on europe and north american market as well where there's a lot of maturity and understanding about creating connected supply chains and being able to leverage technology further and india continues to be a very very important market where a lot of it's a large market where we are pushing uh the boundaries here at the same time now we've got customers in europe we're talking to customers in north america now and also bringing about a new thought process around sustainability carbon climate change things that we're able to we want to establish our leadership position and many of the areas that we start operating in right so that's where we look we're looking and continuously focused on we're looking to build a strong partnership network we've signed up with a few partner networks that we already work with and looking to scale those networks as well we've thankfully got support from accelerators and incubators uh plug-in players later program in in the u.s that helped us establish ourselves in that market to a large extent in being able to open up connects there and then be able to leverage that to scale further uh into those markets like you know through partnerships as well as through local networks that we are already uh talking to and expanding uh but you know our like i said the con the focus uh very intent uh is to be global and now with the international sales team now in place we were able to do a lot of that uh very actively so the past year will continue perfect i think just a couple of points there i think just on a lighter note i want to mention there is so much as much talk about carbon as much as what it is in the environment right so we definitely want to do about something about it so we are working on um the entire area about sequestering the carbon from the right folks and then ensuring those who are sequestered the carbon get incentivized for their efforts so there is a huge effort uh that we are putting in together on sustainability that's something which is coming across the food and agriculture again it's not just about soil carbon that we're talking about we're talking about the environmental carbon that's out there and then how do we uh get ourselves into a safer planet that we've been putting together yeah though we were getting on to a very very interesting conversation i have to uh alert you here we have some technical challenge with uh airmeat and showing us three minutes so i'm just being very uh we will just do a rapid fire now i think there are a lot of questions also there so we'll do a rapid fire so one one one pointed answer anybody can take so uh so about the funding plans people have asked about what is the future growth plan funding plans or do you have any announcements to make sure we are just finishing up uh we see around the funding now we will look for you know look for the announcement pretty soon before a week or two yeah fantastic so the next question is uh i mean uh i want to really ask i mean there's a question from an audience where they're asking about trace net already being there how is tracex very different i think this is something that has come across a lot of times so one point so dressnet is behind admin logins uh we ours is very open network and the credibility of the claim is out there for everybody to check so tres net i'm sure we were planning to work with apeta to enhance that so hopefully that will also become part of the network right yeah centralization and decentralization is is the uh correct difference what we are building to what net already is right it is centralized system still perfect so one more question uh very quickly so this is everybody who would want to know what is the endgame tracex i mean are you looking at making it a billion dollar company making it an ipo are you looking at acquisition so what is the what is the game plan i think as of now we are focused on building this and enjoying the journey uh and sharing that with everybody with our employees with our investors and so on uh who knows you know we are doing the best we can and i'm sure at the end either we'll be we'll acquire more companies or we'll become part of a larger ecosystem or get to an ipo as well so fingers crossed yeah we're figuring it out yeah so i mean how do you i mean see yourself with 36 in the next three years i think we will be a profoundly global organization with the market leadership in many areas that we are already working on and we want to be able to consciously focus and achieve that in the market known for uh connected supply chain entry and traceability platform yeah great i'll open the stage to you we have another 10 seconds if you want to uh follow anything which we have missed as a part of the session please do let let let us know yeah i think we are almost done so i don't think we have time as well thank you so much thank you i know and thank you everybody for bringing us on to this wonderful platform uh look forward to share more with everybody and look forward to your support and love and encouragement as always thank you thank you very much all of you
2022-03-26