This article was originally published on the NITI Frontier Tech Respository.

DeHaat is an AI-driven, full-stack agricultural platform founded by IIT and IIM alumni in 2012 with an ambition to solve one of India’s most persistent structural challenges: the fragmentation and inefficiency of smallholder farming. 

Conceived initially as a research project on improving last-mile input delivery and crop advisory, the founders — Shashank Kumar and Manish Kumar — identified a critical gap in how farmers accessed seeds, fertilisers, credit, and market linkages. Traditional supply chains were long, information was fragmented, and farmers lacked timely, actionable agronomic guidance.

DeHaat set out to address this by building a scalable digital ecosystem that integrates AI-enabled advisory, physical service centres, and organised market access into a single, seamless system tailored for India’s agrarian landscape.

In its early years, the DeHaat model was piloted in Bihar, Odisha, and eastern Uttar Pradesh. These regions, dominated by small and marginal farmers cultivating diverse crops, became the first testing ground for a platform that combined predictive advisory with doorstep service delivery. 

The early version of DeHaat focused heavily on farmer education and........

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