Two Civil Engineers with no agriculture background built a Rs 565 crore cattle startup; their weekend project has solved one of India's oldest trade problems

India produces more milk than any other country in the world. It has done so for years. Behind that number are roughly 80 million households, most of them small dairy farmers, whose entire livelihood depends on their animals. And for most of those farmers, buying or selling a cow or buffalo in 2019 worked exactly the same way it did in 1990: local middlemen, physical markets, no price transparency, and almost no recourse if something went wrong.

That is the market Neetu Yadav and Kirti Jangra walked into.

An unlikely place to look for a startup idea


The two had met as hostel roommates at IIT Delhi, where they both studied Civil Engineering, graduating in 2016. After college, they went the expected route. Neetu joined Citi as a Technology Analyst and later moved to Pratilipi as a Product Manager. Kirti went into consulting, first with Nomura and then Penguin Random House India.

Neither had any background in agriculture. Neither had grown up around livestock or dairy farming. What they had was an engineer's instinct for looking at a system and asking why it was still working the way it did fifty years ago.

The cattle market had that written all over it.

What the market actually looked like

India's livestock economy is estimated at around $250 billion. It is one of the largest informal markets in the country, and one of the least touched by digital tools. A farmer wanting to sell a buffalo had to either know the right people locally, travel to a physical mandi, or put their trust in a broker whose incentives did not necessarily align with theirs.

There was no reliable way to price an animal. No way to verify a seller's track record. No way for a buyer in one state to find a good animal listed in another. The entire market ran on personal networks and physical presence.

This is not unusual for agricultural markets in India, but the scale of the gap here was significant. Almost every other major transaction category had moved online to some degree. Cattle had not moved at all.

Starting small, on weekends

Animall began in 2019 not as a fully funded venture but as a weekend project, built alongside their regular work. The core idea was a mobile marketplace where farmers could list animals, browse verified listings and connect with buyers directly, cutting out the intermediary layer that had historically taken a significant cut of every transaction.

Getting the technology working was the easier part. The harder part was convincing farmers to use it.

Livestock is not a small purchase. For many dairy farming families, a single cow or buffalo represents a major financial decision, sometimes financed through loans. Trusting a stranger on an app with that kind of transaction requires a level of confidence that does not come quickly.

The founders had to spend considerable time in the field, learning what farmers actually needed, what made them suspicious, and what would make them come back after the first transaction. The platform had to work for people who may have been using a smartphone for the first time.

Where it stands now

The company has grown to list over 180,000 cattle at any given time, with more than a million buyers and sellers having used the platform, according to figures reported publicly by the company. It has attracted investor backing and is currently valued at approximately Rs 565 crore.

That valuation sits inside a sector, agritech broadly, that has drawn increasing attention from investors over the past few years as the gap between India's agricultural economy and its digital infrastructure has become harder to ignore. But most of that capital has gone into crop farming, soil monitoring, weather data and supply chain tools for produce. The livestock economy has remained comparatively underserved.

The larger point

What makes the Animall story worth paying attention to is less about the founders' IIT pedigree and more about what they chose to do with it.

Indian startup culture has for years celebrated a fairly narrow set of problems worth solving, mostly urban, mostly consumer-facing, mostly built around the assumption that the customer has a reliable internet connection and a credit card. The markets that do not fit that profile have often been left alone, not because the problems are small but because they are harder and less glamorous to work in.

India's cattle economy is neither small nor simple. It is vast, deeply informal, and involves communities that have had very little reason to trust outsiders with their money. Building something useful in that environment requires a different kind of work than building a fintech app.

Whether Animall fully cracks that market remains to be seen. But the fact that two civil engineers with no agricultural background identified a genuine structural failure in one of India's oldest industries, and built something that a million farmers have now used, is the kind of story that tends to get overlooked when the conversation stays fixed on the next unicorn.

(With inputs from The Times of India.)

(This article based on a TOI report draws on publicly available information about Animall Technologies, Neetu Yadav and Kirti Jangra, with additional context from publicly reported data on India's dairy and livestock sector. Valuation and platform figures are based on numbers reported in the public domain and may have changed since. For informational purposes only.)