Interview with Karthik Jayaraman, MD & co-founder of WayCool

What inspired you to start this business?

WayCool was founded with the vision of organising India’s farm-to-fork supply chain, to deliver cleaner and fresher produce to consumers, generate higher returns for farmers, and reduce waste and inefficiency. With the looming threat of climate change, more agriculture businesses are going to realise that net zero and being agriculturally self-sufficient are not contradictory. They are complementary and by being agriculturally self-sufficient in a sustainable manner, we can reduce net emissions.

What is the core concept of WayCool?

The core idea behind WayCool’s tech stack solution, which facilitates traceability and end-to-end integration is to benefit the food ecosystem stakeholders with informed decision-making and real-time intelligence. We want to ensure a seamless supply of food to the end consumer in a cost-effective way while maintaining a certain standard for quality. To accomplish this, we take a multilateral approach to ensure the food supply’s quality, consistency, and reliability.

Give us an overview of your funding and how you plan to utilise it.

We raised $117m in a Series D round of funding. This capital is being used to automate our supply chain and build the data analytics required to make our supply chain more efficient. We are also expanding our range of value-added products to enterprise and retail customers. We also raised around $40m in 2022. We raised $25m in equity and the rest as debt. We held an investors programme on September 15 to attract investors and other partners and are open to new partnerships and investments. So far, we have raised $160m in total, and we are targeting to increase that number to $250m by 2023.

What are some of the expansion plans you have in your pipeline?

We opened an office in the UAE with plans to strengthen our footprint across the Middle East. We entered the regional market in 2021 and now with the first office outside India, we are all set to strengthen our footprint across
the market. We pilot launched various WayCool products in the UAE and so far, are present in over 300 outlets across the country.

Recently, we announced that we are investing in an IoT (Internet of Things) company which is developing technologies for poly house farming, allowing us to do things like predictive irrigation and disease treatment.  We are also discussing potential investment prospects in the hydroponics space. Hopefully, if that happens, we will be able to bring precision indoor farming to our target geographies, be it India or the UAE. 

We’ve joined hands with Climate Group for the EV100 initiative which aims to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles. We also recently acquired the technology stack of Bengaluru-based agri-tech start-up GramworkX to integrate farm management systems with WayCool’s soil to sell full-stack solutions.