Mahanaaryaman Scindia Agri Startup ‘MyMandi’ To Optimize The Potential of 'Thelawalas'

Gwalior's royal family scion Mahanaaryaman Scindia, whose name speaks volumes, has shed his legacy and ventured into building his own empire from scratch through startup MyMandi, which he expects to turn profitable in about one-and-a-half years of its business commencement.

By combining his lineage of public service, lessons of creating social impact by his grandfather late Madhavrao Scindia, and wisdom acquired during work at global firms Boston Consulting Group and Softbank Group, 27-year-old Scindia and his firm's co-founder Suryansh Rana, 25, zeroed in on a common passion of working in the agriculture sector, cut down on waste of fresh produce and logistic costs.

Founded in 2022, MyMandi began operations from Gwalior where Scindia himself goes into local mandis, with a covered face to conceal his identity, for procuring fresh produce and sell the inventory to the firm's last-mile delivery partners -- street vendors and cart pushers’ community.

The formula of their venture has led to a four-fold growth in business over a period of six months from monthly revenue of Rs 11 lakh in July 2022 to approximately Rs 60 lakh in January 2022, Scindia told PTI.

"In the next coming months, our aim is to grow to about Rs 1.5 to Rs 2 crore by March this year and we expect to close this fiscal year with Rs 4.5-5 crore turnover. For 2023-24, we plan to get to Rs 5 crore per month by December and plan to hit total revenue of Rs 25 crore in the next financial year. We believe, we should be profitable by December," Scindia said.

He said that the company has started discussions with investors to raise around Rs 8 crore (USD 1 million) funds at an enterprise valuation of Rs 150 crore in the first half of this year.

"We plan to invest the fund into technology to get better data and insights into cities that we are operating and make ourselves more operationally efficient and also invest into people. It will correct our margin from 15 to 18 per cent. With that in mind, we believe we will be profitable by December this year," Scindia said.

Rana said that MyMandi's cash flow is healthy and the company requires fresh investment only for expansion into new cities.

MyMandi has to date raised Rs 4.2 crore from a bunch of investors.

"MyMandi investors were surprised that we will expand to five cities with only Rs 4.2 crore. We have reached five cities and half of the money raised is still in our bank account," he said.

The company now expects its monthly revenue to grow to Rs 5 crore, (or Rs 60 crore annual recurring revenue) with the expansion of business to 8 cities by December 2024, Scindia said.

MyMandi aims to optimize the potential of the "thelawalla" community by expanding their basket from just fruits and vegetables to daily essentials.

"India has the largest network of thelawalas (cart pushers) community so we don't need to reinvent the wheels. All the other companies hire drivers or delivery partners and pay them but in our business thelawalas purchase entire day inventory from us and sells it further. Our job is to just bring them online and supply them," Scindia said.

He said with this business model, MyMandi has brought down logistics costs to 3-4 per cent compared to about 15 per cent incurred by large delivery platforms.

-With PTI Inputs

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