The two IIT Delhi roommates-turned-cofounders of Animall’s simple smartphone app enable dairy producers to start their own farms by effectively and rapidly acquiring access to premium animals.
Neetu Yadav and Kirti Jangra, roommates at IIT-Delhi, aspired to make a difference. And Animall, their dairy farming firm, served as a means to that end. Animall, an online platform that empowers dairy farmers throughout India, began as a weekend project in August 2019 and has since grown to become a top-tier VC-funded firm.
Animall was founded in December 2019 in Gurugram by Neetu Yadav, Kirti Jangra, Anurag Bisoyi (UX designer), and Libin V Babu (senior front-end developer). “Today, the world’s largest dairy business is yearning for upheaval, and at Animall, we are preparing for that good disruption,” Jangra explains.
Yadav and Jangra founded Animall after speaking with hundreds of farmers and seeing that the cattle market in India is not only fragmented, but also unorganised. “This market appealed to us and was huge enough to be both demanding and intriguing,” Yadav adds. Animall began with a pre-seed fundraising round of 50 lakhs in January 2020, and Yadav and Jangra have since raised 167.3 crores from investors such as Beenext, WEH, Sequoia, Omnivore, Rocketship Nexus, and SIG.
“Dairy farming has been the most important source of employment in rural India, and we want to expand on that,” adds Yadav. In December, 180,000 cattle were listed for sale on Animall, with over 1 million buyer-seller connections made.
According to Jangra, Animall’s greatest success is turning online cow trade, which was formerly dismissed as a joke, into a banal, everyday occurrence for dairy producers. Animall, through a ‘easy-to-use’ mobile application, has enabled dairy producers to start their own farms by obtaining access to excellent animals in a timely and effective manner. “After a month of struggle, a farmer was able to sell three of his cows using Animall within 24 hours.”
“He told us, ‘Yeh app nahin aandolan hai (it’s not an app, it’s a revolution)’,” Yadav recalled. “These words will stick with us because, at the core of our business, this is exactly what we want to do: usher in the next white revolution.”
“Neetu and Kirti are deeply insightful about the problem they are solving, and we believe that Animall will change the face of this $250+ billion cattle and dairy market, which has historically been largely unorganised and unregulated,” says Rajan Anandan, managing director of Sequoia Capital India and a company investor.