Dear Reader,

Thank you for visiting our website. Gramhal has officially shut down. Below is a synopsis of our journey.

In late 2018, Gramhal was founded to build solutions that improve farmers' agency to make better decisions during farmgate sale and earn a fair price for their crops. We began with warehouse financing, where farmers voluntarily pooled and mixed their crops to create a larger, market-ready lot. Each farmer retained ownership, accessed credit independently, and made individual decisions about when and how much to sell. While this gave farmers greater control, we, as a small organization, were quickly overwhelmed when it came time to sell the aggregated lot ourselves.

This led us to pivot to a leaner model, offering paid doorstep crop quality inspection and personalized price information. The crop quality receipt became a tool for the farmers to do better negotiations during the farmgate sale. However, the price data we sourced from industrial buyers was often dismissed by local farmgate traders. This credibility gap pushed us to pivot once more—toward a crowdsourced model for crop price information.

With this new approach, we did find a solution that had strong product-impact fit. The next challenge was to achieve product-market fit. During the same period, we were part of the Mulago Foundation and LSE’s 100X ecosystem, which offered complementary ways of thinking about PMF and scale. Mulago emphasized identifying the doer and payer at scale, while 100X focused on End Game experimentation.

Based on all our learnings, we pursued two potential end games. First, we tested whether a farmer-paid subscription could generate enough revenue to sustain a farmer-led data cooperative. In a year, over 2,300 farmers subscribed to access crowdsourced price data with a 33% re-subscription rate. While this proved the usability of the product in farmers' lives, the revenue was only a fraction of what would be needed to sustain a cooperative model.

Second, we explored government adoption of our product’s core features. Here, we got lucky that we became part of a team that designed version 2 of the national crop price platform. However, the government’s efforts remained focused on improving UI/UX for mandi staff input, rather than reimagining the system through a farmer-first lens.

In the end, neither path led to a viable, scalable solution.

We created Gramhal as a vehicle to strengthen the agency of India’s farming communities. After years of experimentation and pivots, we reached a moment where it became necessary to pause and reflect. Rather than continuing to iterate without a viable path to scale or sustainability, we chose to step back and ask ourselves how best we can carry forward our collective and individual missions. As a result, we made the difficult but thoughtful decision to close Gramhal as an organization. Nonetheless, each one of us on the team remains deeply committed to the cause and is continuing our individual journey in the broader effort to create meaningful, lasting change in the lives of the farming community in India.

All of our blogs are listed below; we’ve kept them live so the ideas, experiences, and lessons remain accessible.

If you'd like to get in touch, feel free to write to me at vikasbirhma@gmail.com

With lots of gratitude,
Vikas Birhma
On behalf of the Gramhal team