Farmdar creates usable data for farms and businesses by combining cutting-edge technology with high-resolution, multi-band satellite images. This information directly impacts farmers’ and businesses’ efficiency and profitability.
Indus Valley Capital led the round, which included Deosai Ventures, Tricap Investments, United Distributors Pakistan Limited, The Community Fund VC, LMKR, and K2 Global Ventures, as well as key investors from Pakistan, the Middle East, and the United States.
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 by childhood friends Muhammed Bukhari, Muzaffar Manghi, and Ibrahim Bokhari, who is himself a third-generation large farmer. The company’s founders committed to take action.
“We began by focusing on supply chain improvements, such as cold chain, which allowed us to extend 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 essential crops such as sugarcane, wheat, and rice in the world, but we rank 50th or lower 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’s aim is to create a food secure future 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. Because there is an inherent human impact, many data points for individual farmers will be free, as will registration on the Farmdar web-app. 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 helps lessen the impact of agricultural activity on climate change by increasing production 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 maximise crop productivity by increasing yield, minimising harvest loss and input costs, and monitoring illnesses using artificial intelligence. We understood how valuable this information was, but we were astonished to learn how widespread the demand for it was, both among 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 markets such as Thailand, Turkey, Bangladesh, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the Middle East.
