Gramophone Agritech Startup Story: Tauseef Khan, Nishant Mahatre and the Unnati Deal

In FY23, Gramophone reported revenue of ₹315.7 crore ($38.0 million). A year later it was ₹98.2 crore ($11.8 million). Inc42 reported the fall in December 2024, and founder Tauseef Khan gave a plain reason: the company had shut the business that produced most of that money. This Gramophone agritech startup story is about why a team of IIT and IIM graduates in Indore chose a smaller company, and where that choice stands in November 2026.

In this story (about 10 minutes)

Two batchmates, a phone line and a move to Indore

Tauseef Khan and Nishant Vats Mahatre trained as agricultural engineers at IIT Kharagpur and went on to MBAs at IIM Ahmedabad. The Better India reported that they met Harshit Gupta there, in the agri-business programme between 2012 and 2014. The fourth founder, Ashish Rajan Singh, is an IIT Madras graduate and a childhood friend of Khan. Entrepreneur India reported that he joined as chief technology officer.

Before Gramophone, Khan and Mahatre had worked with agri-business companies, agritech-focused venture funds and farm-management startups, YourStory reported in May 2021. None of that made Indore an obvious choice. It was a deliberate one. In an October 2016 YourStory profile, the founders said they did months of on-ground research to pick a place to start, then relocated: Khan from Bengaluru, Mahatre from Mumbai.

The company was registered in Indore on 23 May 2016, according to a company-registry listing. YourStory reported in September 2019 that Khan and Mahatre bootstrapped it with ₹10 lakh.

Depalpur first, the app a year later

The first Gramophone was not an app. Khan told YourStory in May 2021 that the team began by putting an agriculture expert on a phone call with farmers. The expert diagnosed a problem and suggested products, and input sales followed. There was no app or website for more than a year, until mid-2017.

“we simply started with a missed call service”

Tauseef Khan, co-founder and CEO, to YourStory, 5 May 2021

His explanation was about timing. Jio had not yet changed mobile data in India when they began in 2016. The phone-first start shaped the product. The team later described reaching farmers through a missed-call line, a call centre, the app, Gram Uday fulfilment centres and a field-team app called Gram Konnect, so a farmer with a basic phone could still use the service.

The founders also spent time in Depalpur tehsil, about 50 km from Indore, to see farming up close. Khan said the farming economy runs on trust and that referrals drove early growth. In his telling, the first app offered advice content and a product listing. Singh and a few friends built it, along with the Gram Intel agronomy engine and a basic CRM, while the wider technology team worked from Bengaluru.

These are the founders’ own accounts. StartupIndiaX has not independently verified them.

Read More: DeHaat Founders: How Shashank Kumar and Amrendra Singh Built a ₹2,715 Crore Agritech

Advice, inputs and a trading app: what Gramophone actually sold

By 2021 Khan described Gramophone as a full-stack platform built on three products, according to YourStory. Gram Salah gave farmers personalised agronomy advice. Gram Uday supplied inputs. Gram Vyapar, launched in 2021, connected farmers with traders, commission agents and processors after harvest.

Most of the money came from the second product. Inc42 reported in January 2026 that Gramophone sells seeds, fertilisers, nutrients, pesticides and farming equipment to farmers directly and through small retailers. Advice was the hook, and inputs were the sale. Khan said in 2021 that Gramophone had begun charging for farm-management features and wanted to move 10% of farmers to a premium version of Gram Salah.

Gramophone has made large claims about farmer outcomes. These are company claims, not verified results:

• Yield gains of 30 to 40% and input cost cuts of 10 to 15%, as Khan told YourStory in May 2021.
• Retention on its app rising from 36% in FY20 to more than 60% in FY21, in the same interview.
• More than 8 lakh farmers onboarded by May 2021, while a sponsored Inc42 Brandlabs feature in 2022 put the figure at 2.5 million.

Farmer counts vary by page and date, so treat any single figure with care.

The investors who kept coming back

Info Edge backed Gramophone early and stayed. It led a pre-Series A round in March 2018, which YourStory reported as $1 million (₹6.4 crore). In August 2019 Gramophone raised ₹24 crore ($3.5 million) in Series A from Info Edge, Raveen Sastry (co-founder of Myntra), Asha Impact and Better Capital. Siana Capital led a ₹25 crore ($3.4 million) round in December 2020.

The biggest round came in October 2021: ₹75 crore (about $10 million), led by Z3Partners, with Info Edge, Asha Impact and Siana returning. Gramophone said it would spend the money on geographic expansion, marketing, technology and acquisitions.

“double down on investing in technologies that lower costs, improve transparency”

Tauseef Khan, on the Series B, as quoted by SiliconIndia, October 2021

Inc42 reported in December 2024 that Gramophone had raised about $20.5 million in total and that Info Edge held about 40%. Info Edge had also decided to invest ₹15 crore (about $1.8 million) in two tranches. Sources date that top-up differently, so it is not in Figure 1.

The year Gramophone closed its biggest business

Inc42 reported in December 2024 that Gramophone’s revenue fell 68.9% to ₹98.2 crore ($11.8 million) in FY24 from ₹315.7 crore ($38.0 million) in FY23. Net loss narrowed to ₹34.8 crore ($4.2 million) from ₹57.9 crore ($7.0 million).

The reason was a decision, not a collapse. Gramophone had run a marketplace business, Gram Vyapar, through which farmers sold their produce. Khan told Inc42 that this output business generated about 70% of FY23 revenue, but margins were thin.

“It was a low margin and high capital business and hence, we shuttered it.”

Tauseef Khan to Inc42, 19 December 2024

The closure had a cost in jobs. Khan confirmed that the company let go of employees from the output vertical, and employee expenses fell 40.75% to ₹18.9 crore ($2.3 million) from ₹31.9 crore ($3.8 million). Advertising spend dropped from ₹5.5 crore ($0.7 million) to ₹70 lakh.

What replaced the revenue was a push into own brands. Khan said Gramophone launched more than 60 farm-input brands and that own brands made up 20% of FY24 revenue, against 2% a year earlier. He expected 35 to 40% in FY25 and cash burn below $1 million. Those were forecasts, not results.

Handle the numbers with care. Entrackr described the same FY24 and FY23 figures as gross revenue, or GMV, of ₹98 crore against ₹316 crore, so outlets label them differently. FY25 is murkier: trackers show anything from ₹11.3 crore ($1.4 million) to ₹71 crore ($8.6 million), and no filing-based figure was available to StartupIndiaX. We therefore do not publish an FY25 revenue number. Entrackr’s unnamed sources said in November 2025 that the shift to inputs produced a turnaround in FY25 and an annual run rate of about ₹150 crore ($18.1 million) for FY26. Treat that as an unverified source claim.

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The Unnati deal, and what nobody has confirmed yet

The first public sign came in January 2025, when VCCircle reported that Gramophone was weighing a merger with a venture-backed agritech startup, according to Tracxn’s news listing. On 13 November 2025, Entrackr reported that Unnati Agri was set to acquire Gramophone in a share swap. Its unnamed sources said Gramophone would hold roughly 30 to 35% of the combined company and that both businesses would keep operating independently. The companies have not confirmed those figures.

On 3 January 2026, Info Edge’s board approved the transaction. Its subsidiary, Startup Investments (Holding) Ltd, agreed to transfer 339,305 Gramophone shares, a 50.94% stake on a fully diluted basis, to Unnati at ₹2,702.87 a share. That values the stake at ₹91.7 crore ($10.1 million). In return, Unnati issued 49,145 preference shares at ₹18,661 each, a 15.75% stake. Info Edge also agreed to invest ₹35 crore (about $3.9 million) in Unnati, lifting its holding to 20.53%. That would dilute to 18.48% once all Gramophone shareholders receive Unnati shares. ScanX reported that the transfer was completed on 19 February 2026.

Info Edge said its stake in Gramophone rose from 39.58% to 50.94% on an as-converted basis because of the valuation at which the exit event was struck.

Unnati is a Noida-based agri-input distribution and financing startup. It was founded in 2017 by Amit Sinha, a former chief operating officer of Paytm Mall, and Ashok Prasad, and Venture Intelligence reported that its B2B business covers Haryana, Maharashtra, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh. Reports describe the logic as pairing Unnati’s distribution and credit network with Gramophone’s farmer-facing advice and commerce platform.

Several things are not public. Neither company said whether the Gramophone brand and app will continue, or what roles Gramophone’s founders will hold, StartupsAcquired noted in January 2026. Inc42 reported in 2026 that Navneet Singh Batra, who became a co-founder in 2024 to lead sales and marketing, left to join Superplum as chief business officer. StartupIndiaX found no source confirming that the full merger has closed as of November 2026. This is a developing story.

Editorial analysis: Gramophone cut its biggest revenue line in FY24, and about a year later its main investor moved its stake into a larger input distributor. Whether that reads as rescue or strength depends on figures the companies have not published.

Read More: Kuku FM Founder Story: How a Farmer’s Son Built a ₹1,484 Crore Audio and Microdrama Business

Ten dates that sum up Gramophone’s decade

The timeline below pulls the sourced milestones into one place.

Who Gramophone competes with, and how that list changed

YourStory’s May 2021 profile listed Plantix, AgNext, Fasal, AgroStar and Agri10x among Gramophone’s competitors. Inc42’s December 2024 report named DeHaat, AgroStar, Ninjacart, Bijak and Crofarm. Only AgroStar appears on both lists.

Editorial analysis: the change in named rivals tracks the company’s own move from advice-led to input-led selling. A company that starts as an advice app is compared with advice apps. One that sells inputs gets compared with input platforms.

Read More: CarDekho founder story: How Amit and Anurag Jain Built a Jaipur Unicorn

Net worth and valuation: what is known and what is not

No verified net worth figure exists for Tauseef Khan, Nishant Mahatre, Harshit Gupta or Ashish Rajan Singh, and StartupIndiaX does not publish one. Founder shareholdings were not disclosed in the sources reviewed, and the deal filings concern Info Edge’s stake, not the founders’.

What is known is narrower. The Info Edge disclosure values its 50.94% stake at ₹91.7 crore ($10.1 million), as of January 2026. A stake price is not a company valuation, and it is not a personal fortune. Gramophone’s last priced primary round in our sources, the October 2021 Series B, had no disclosed valuation.

What founders can take from Gramophone

Cut revenue that does not pay. The output business supplied about 70% of FY23 revenue, but Khan called it low-margin and capital-hungry. Closing it shrank the company on paper and cost jobs. It also protected the economics.

Earn trust before you build technology. Gramophone began with a phone call and a missed-call line, then waited until mid-2017 for an app. Farmers who cannot see a product ask a person first.

Own the margin. In Khan’s account to Inc42, own brands went from 2% to 20% of revenue in a year. That was the clearest lever in the FY24 reset.

Pick backers who can carry the next chapter. Info Edge invested in March 2018, held about 40% by December 2024 and moved its stake into Unnati in 2026. Early investors also shape the exit, so ask how they think about it before you sign.

A Tier 2 story that is not finished

Gramophone began in a tehsil outside Indore, and a decade later its future is tied to a Noida-based distributor. What the merged company looks like depends on a closing nobody has confirmed. We will update this article as filings and reports arrive.

Building in a smaller city? Tell us in the comments what you would have done with a revenue line that supplied 70% of sales but barely paid. Or submit your own founder story.

FAQs

Sources and disclosure

Story type: public-source profile.

Sources:

• YourStory, “[Startup of the day] Indore-based Gramophone aims to remove the information asymmetry faced by farmers”, October 2016. https://yourstory.com/2016/10/gramophone
• YourStory, “Agritech startup Gramophone raises $1 million in pre-Series A funding led by Info Edge”, March 2018. https://yourstory.com/2018/03/agritech-startup-gramophone-raises-1-million-pre-series-funding-led-infoedge
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] Agritech startup Gramophone raises Rs 24 Cr in Series A”, August 2019. https://yourstory.com/2019/08/funding-startup-agritech-gramophone-info-edge-asha-impact-better-capital
• YourStory, “How 2 IIT and IIM batchmates are helping farmers turn around India’s agricultural sector”, September 2019. https://yourstory.com/socialstory/2019/09/iim-iit-gramophone-app-farmers-agricultural-industry
• Entrepreneur India, “This Indore-Based Agritech Startup Helps Farmers Increase Yield Upto 40%”, 14 September 2020. https://entrepreneur.com/article/356136
• Entrepreneur India, “Agritech Platform Gramophone Raises $3.4 Mn Led By Siana Capital”, 30 December 2020. https://india.entrepreneur.com/finance/agritech-platform-gramophone-raises-34-mn-led-by-siana/362533
• YourStory, “[Product Roadmap] How Gramophone used tech to increase crop yields by over 30 pc for 8 lakh+ farmers”, 5 May 2021. https://yourstory.com/2021/05/product-roadmap-agritech-startup-gramophone-technology-farmers
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] Agritech startup Gramophone raises $10 M round led by Z3Partners”, October 2021. https://yourstory.com/2021/10/agritech-startup-gramophone-funds-z3partners
• SiliconIndia, “Agritech Start-up Gramophone Secures INR 75 Crore; Projects Expansion through M&A”, October 2021 (date not shown on the page). https://startup.siliconindia.com/startup-funding/agritech-startup-gramophone-secures-inr-75-crore-projects-expansion-through-ma-nwid-29987.html
• Inc42 Brandlabs (sponsored), “How Agritech Startup Gramophone Is Helping 2.5 Mn Indian Farmers”, 2022. https://inc42.com/startups/how-agritech-startup-gramophone-is-helping-2-5-mn-indian-farmers-improve-crop-yield-increase-profit
• Inc42, “Gramophone’s FY24 Revenue Slumps 69% To INR 98 Cr”, 19 December 2024. https://inc42.com/buzz/gramophones-fy24-revenue-slumps-69-to-inr-98-cr/
• Entrackr, “Info Edge-backed Gramophone’s GMV shrinks 70% in FY24”. https://entrackr.com/fintrackr/info-edge-backed-gramophone-gmv-shrinks-70-in-fy24-7658812
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Unnati Agri and Gramophone to merge in share-swap deal”, November 2025. https://entrackr.com/exclusive/exclusive-unnati-agri-set-to-acquire-gramophone-in-share-swap-deal-10652827
• Entrackr, “Info Edge confirms Gramophone-Unnati merger, to hold 20% stake”, January 2026. https://entrackr.com/news/info-edge-confirms-gramophoneunnati-merger-to-hold-20-stake-10970360
• Inc42, “Unnati To Acquire Info Edge-Backed Agritech Startup Gramophone”, 5 January 2026. https://inc42.com/buzz/unnati-to-acquire-info-edge-backed-agritech-startup-gramophone/
• Staffing Industry Analysts, “Info Edge sells Gramophone stake, invests in agri platform Unnati”, 5 January 2026. https://www.staffingindustry.com/news/global-daily-news/info-edge-sells-gramophone-stake-invests-in-agri-platform-unnati
• StartupsAcquired, “Unnati agrees to take over Info Edge-backed agritech Gramophone in share-swap merger”, January 2026. https://www.startupsacquired.com/deals/unnati-acquires-gramophone
• ScanX, “Info Edge Subsidiary Completes Strategic Transfer of Gramophone Stake to Unnati”, February 2026. https://scanx.trade/stock-market-news/orders-deals/info-edge-subsidiary-completes-strategic-transfer-of-gramophone-stake-to-unnati-with-additional-investment/33035015
• Info Edge stock exchange intimation, 4 January 2026. https://www.infoedge.in/announcements/IEIL_StockExchangeIntimationSIHLandGramophone_04012026.pdf
• Inc42, “Gramophone Cofounder Navneet Singh Batra Quits, Joins Superplum”, 2026. https://inc42.com/buzz/gramophone-cofounder-navneet-singh-batra-quits-joins-superplum/
• Venture Intelligence, “Gramophone to merge with Unnati Agri in share-swap deal: Report”. https://news.ventureintelligence.com/private-equity/gramophone-to-merge-with-unnati-agri-in-share-swap-deal:report
• The Better India, “IIM Ahmedabad graduates farmers’ income Gramophone”. https://thebetterindia.com/257756/iim-ahmedabad-graduates-farmers-income-gramophone-agri-tech-startup
• Infyner, Agstack Technologies Private Limited company overview (registration data). https://www.infyner.com/company/gramophone/U74999MP2016PTC040803
• Tracxn, Gramophone company profile and news listing. https://tracxn.com/d/companies/gramophone/__ctdh-cvEOKclofK2GBF-nMAcBQNm9foJJbf5V8GdG7s

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Written by StartupIndiaX Editorial Team, StartupIndiaX writer covering Indian startups, founders, and entrepreneurship.