How This Technology Startup is Improving Dairy Supply Chain Stellapps offers farm optimization and monitoring tools to improve dairy supply chain end-to-end including milk's production, procurement, cold chain, animal insurance and farmer payments.

RANJITH MUKUNDAN (33), CO-FOUNDER AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, STELLAPPS TECHNOLOGIES

Dairy technology start-up Stellapps offers farm optimization and monitoring tools to improve dairy supply chain end-to-end including milk's production, procurement, cold chain, animal insurance and farmer payments.

"What's unique to our business is first, acquiring data across the dairy supply chain via sensors bundled with automation equipment using an IoT architecture and second, applying machine learning and analytics on the acquired data in the cloud and using our SmartMoo smart service delivery platform," says Mukundan. "This helps us keep the capital expenditure low and move towards a predominantly pay-as-you-grow subscription model," he adds. The company aims at the small and mid-size dairy markets in India.

However, there have been few challenges too. "Considering the rural remoteness of Stellapps's deployments, even support and maintenance was initially a challenge." The start-up nonetheless mitigated that through cloud interfaces and training of their customer support teams.

Mukundan also asserts that adherence to quality control, traceability; supply chain and cold chain optimization protocols were abysmal. This resulted in consumption of significantly more time with respect to getting the customers to appreciate the need and value of their offerings.

MAKING A SPLASH

LAUNCH 2011 in Bengaluru

MONTHLY TRANSACTIONS 324

TURNOVER Rs 21 Cr. (2016-17)

HEADCOUNT >250

NO. OF PATENTS 4

(This article was first published in the May issue of BIZ Experiences Magazine. To subscribe, click here)