Smart Systems, Stellar Applications.
Stellapps has completed the first close towards its pre-series C round from various investors. The total size of the round will be USD 18 Mn. This fundraising round also saw participation from existing investors including Qualcomm Ventures, Celesta Capital, and ABB Technology Ventures.
Stellapps is an end-to-end dairy technology solutions company.
Stellapps was founded in 2011 by five technology industry veterans who believed that IoT could transform rural India. Last year, Stellapps was one of the two Indian companies featured in the list of Technology Pioneers by the World Economic Forum. Its award-winning smartMoo technology solutions enhance productivity, milk quality and enable traceability. By enabling ecosystem partnerships through its online platform, Stellapps enables farmers to gain access to financial services, quality nutrition, and timely veterinary care. Stellapps’ mooPay FinTech arm facilitates the financial inclusion of smallholder farmers by providing access to digital payments, banking, savings, cash withdrawal, credit, and insurance.
The latest funding round is a significant step forward to enabling Stellapps technology to solve these challenges. The technology is an internationally acclaimed farm to consumer dairy digitization service and will ensure that farmers gain access to services such as farm improvement, cattle nutrition, credit, and insurance, to help them capitalize on the growing market while improving their sustainable farming methods. Stellapps plans to deploy the funds to rapidly scale up its traceability network and extend its digital footprint across India.
Joost Matthijssen, Nutreco Director of Venturing, added, “Smallholder farmers account for two-thirds of dairy farmers in India. Realizing the full genetic potential of their animals is crucial to significantly increase sustainable productivity of the Indian dairy value chain. Stellapps’ end-to-end digitised model can help to capture this growth potential by offering access to quality products, services, financing and markets. If successful, this innovative model could help pave the way for similar applications in other key regions, such as Africa.
Ranjith Mukundan, CEO of Stellapps remarked, “Our vision is to unlock unprecedented value across the dairy supply chain for all stakeholders, especially smallholder farmers. We are on a mission to shift the Indian smallholder farmers into the agripreneur orbit by enhancing productivity, improving quality, and enabling traceability through our smartMoo solutions.
Stellapps is the first of its kind startup in India working towards the digitization of the dairy supply chain. Stellaps is an IIT-Madras incubated company founded by a group of IITians and technologists with a strong industry background and rich experience including IIT-Madras, IIT-Kharagpur, and IIM-Ahmedabad alumni, with over 18 years of Industry experience across Wipro, Nortel, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Vodafone, Telstra, Bharti-Airtel, Aircel, Avaya, Cisco et al. They produce and procure comprehensive farm optimization and monitoring support, which helps dairy farmers and cooperatives maximize profits while minimizing effort.
Stellapps is funded by Omnivore Capital – a fund anchored by Godrej Agrovet Limited and investment patrons include a large group of IIT alumni. Their innovative applications and state-of-the-art mechanization tools leverage the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, Cloud, Mobility, and Data Analytics to improve Agri- Dairy supply chain parameters, including milk production, milk procurement, cold chain, animal insurance, and farmer payments. Their SmartMoo™ IoT router and in-premise IoT Controller acquire data via sensors that are embedded in Milking Systems, Animal Wearables, Milk Chilling Equipment & Milk Procurement Peripherals, and transmit the same to the Stellapps SmartMoo™ Big Data Cloud Service Delivery Platform (SDP) where the SmartMoo™ suite of applications analyze and crunch the received data before disseminating the Analytics & Data Science outcome to various stakeholders over low-end and smart mobile devices.
Co-founders’ backgrounds
Ranjith Mukundan is the CEO & Managing Director. He’s a telecom & software engineer who has lead a team of 250 people as part of the Wipro Telecom Application Practice and has 23 years of industry experience.
Ravishankar Shiroor is Director & Business Development Head. An IIT-Madras alumnus, he has 24 years of industry experience in embedded software and telecoms. He has been a strategy advisor at AT&T, Telstra, Nortel, Ericsson, and Alcatel-Lucent.
Praveen Nale is Director & Chief Technology Officer. He’s also an IIT- Madras alumnus with 22 years of industry experience in Hardware, Embedded Software, and Telecom. He has the unusual combination of hands-on exposure to both hardware and software.
Ramakrishna Adukuri is the Head of Software Solutions. He is an IIT-Kharagpur alumnus with 22 years of industry experience in Telecoms and Enterprise Architecture. He has been the Chief Architect of unified communications & Cloud.
Venkatesh Seshasayee is the Head of Domain Solutions. He has 21 years of industry experience, including that of Chief Architect of Service Delivery Platform (SDP) technology deployed in many telecom service providers’ networks.
