Pune Startup Sorts Onions by Quality Using Vision Tech

In warehouses across India, two workers looking at the same sack of onions will argue about its quality, and those disagreements ripple into rejected shipments and financial losses for farmers. Agrograde built machines to settle those disputes for good.

Founded in 2017 by Kshitij Thakur and Rakeshkumar Barai, the Pune-based company created sorting equipment designed specifically for Indian crops. Their machines use vision technology that reads texture and defects, not just color, so they work on unwashed, field-fresh produce that confuses imported equipment.

The breakthrough matters because more than 99% of Indian packhouses still sort by hand and eye. The workforce doing that work is aging, with the average age past 45, and manual sorting creates inconsistency that costs everyone money when buyers and sellers can't agree on what they're trading.

Agrograde's onion system uses a gentle wave motion that grades without damaging the delicate outer skin, something imported machines routinely destroyed. Their potato sorter adjusts rotation to match the vegetable's shape, and the system switches between varieties without needing recalibration.

Getting it right took eight years of data collection and six product iterations. The result is 96% defect detection accuracy on crops that vary wildly in appearance, solving a problem global manufacturers never designed for.

The company raised just $170,000 across three funding rounds from development-focused investors including Social Alpha and Villgro. They built slowly, selling machines from the start rather than burning through venture capital.

The Ripple Effect

Today, 130 Agrograde machines run across 14 states and four different crops. Each one brings consistency to a supply chain where quality disagreements previously meant lost income for farmers and higher prices for consumers.

The company earned recognition as a top agritech startup in Mahindra's 2023 competition and made NITI Aayog's list of 75 agricultural innovators. They're now raising a pre-Series A round to expand manufacturing and work toward fully autonomous packhouses.

Thakur says wider adoption will require getting grading capacity closer to farm gates and better financing for the farmer cooperatives and mid-sized packhouses that can't afford machines outright. His team is building toward that future, one potato and onion at a time.