How Bharat Intelligence Is Fixing Maharashtra’s Farm Labour Shortage
Mumbai-based agritech startup Bharat Intelligence has created a digital model of villages across Maharashtra, where its AI engine accurately deploys labourers to farmers facing acute shortages.
Azhaan Merchant saw a massive shortage in India’s farming sector after examining various horticulture value chains across rural Maharashtra. While much of the industry was trying to compensate through mechanisation, Merchant understood that this approach was neither cost-effective nor practical for many crops. Instead, he believed the solution lay in technology in rethinking how agricultural workforces are discovered, deployed, and managed at scale.
That conviction led Merchant to Bengaluru in February 2024, where he joined a programme under a venture capital incubator and interacted closely with nearly 50 potential co-founders. There he met Gourav Sanghai. Later that year the duo founded Bharat Intelligence, with Merchant as CEO and Sanghai as CTO.
“We are trying to solve the agricultural labour crisis end-to-end. As per the last Census, nearly 14 crore labourers work on someone else’s farm. We want to ensure these labourers have access to consistent wages for at least 300 days a year,” Merchant tells YourStory.
The Mumbai-based startup has a 22-member team spread across Nashik, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. It is currently working with grape farmers in Nashik one of India’s most labour-intensive horticulture belts where almost eight lakh people depend on seasonal farm work for their livelihoods.
Building Digital Twins of Villages
Designing for farmers and workers from underserved communities meant prioritising accessibility over complexity. According to Sanghai, Bharat Intelligence deliberately chose familiar interfaces over standalone apps.
“Most of our front-end operations happen on WhatsApp. We have partnered with Meta to enable that. We also rely heavily on voice calls as both farmers and labourers are comfortable speaking over the phone. Our AI stack records these conversations and analyses them to extract structured insights,” he explains.
Bharat Intelligence’s technology serves two sides of the marketplace: farmers (demand) and workers (supply). On the farmer’s side, the startup has created robust profiles of growers in Nashik, capturing over 1,000 data points on each through its partners. It also uses geospatial data, which, on deeper analysis, reveals when to aid which farm and with how many people.
The supply side, Sanghai says, poses a far greater challenge because of the lack of data visibility. While macro-level statistics exist, they do not help in truly understanding the nature of available workers. This is where Bharat Intelligence had to build its major intellectual property.
“We have built a digital village model that acts like a digital twin of 40,000 villages in Maharashtra, where we analyse 10,000 data points per village to understand demographics and identify labour pools. This allows us to create a ‘village calendar’ to track when specific workforces are available and what their skill sets are,” explains Sanghai.
At the core of the system is an AI-powered matchmaking engine that dynamically aligns demand with supply to increase utilisation of farm labour.
How the Business Model Works
Bharat Intelligence charges farmers an average of ₹6,100 per acre, a price point Merchant says growers are willing to pay despite tight margins.
“Farmers are generally not price-sensitive because of the severity of the labour crisis. They value a premium service that removes the ‘hassle’ of finding, negotiating with, and managing workers from local labour markets,” he says.
Currently operating only with grape farmers in Nashik, the B2C agritech startup reports an 86% retention rate. Merchant describes its scaling strategy as crop-specific and operationally intensive, emulating a services-driven model similar to Urban Company by managing daily deployments, quality control, and same-day payments.
The platform currently supports 1,200 active workers with another 3,000 waiting to get deployed. The team has successfully built its foundational deployment, matching, and payment stacks.
“Our goal is to scale to 10,000 active daily labourers over the next 12 months. To hit this target, we only need about 5,000 acres under management. Since Nashik has 1.5 lakh acres, and we already have 20,000 of them onboarded, we only need to serve 25% of our existing farmer base to reach our goal. It is now a matter of executing efficiently to ensure both sides of the marketplace benefit,” he elaborates.
By improving the reliability and predictability of farm labour, the platform aims to raise incomes for workers while giving farmers timely access to the hands they need during critical windows.
Funding, Headwinds, and Differentiation
Merchant notes that the agritech sector has had a tough few years, marked by high-profile bankruptcies and declining investor confidence. Despite agriculture’s massive contribution—18% of India’s GDP—the sector still lacks a unicorn, discouraging investors seeking outsized returns.
In September 2025, the startup raised ₹7 crore in a pre-seed round led by Sahyadri Farms. Because Bharat Intelligence is not dependent on investment in heavy machinery, most of the capital has been retained and is used for employee salaries.
Vilas Shinde, Chairman and Managing Director of Sahyadri Farms, says the investment aligns with Sahyadri’s vision of strengthening the entire agricultural value chain—from market access to post-harvest solutions and farm-level innovations.
“Labour availability has become one of the most pressing challenges for our farmers, particularly in horticulture. Through our investment in Bharat Intelligence, we are not only addressing this critical issue with the power of AI, but also empowering thousands of farmers to become shareholders in the technology shaping their future,” Shinde adds.
Competing with startups such as Noida-based Digital Labour Chowk, Bharat Intelligence differentiates itself through its focus on handling end-to-end operations without relying on lofty mechanisation promises. The emphasis remains on making farm labour more discoverable, reliable, and fairly compensated.
Solving a Structural Problem with Data and Matching
The deeper challenge is structural. Seasonal demand peaks create temporary shortages even while large numbers of workers remain under-employed for much of the year. By building detailed digital twins of villages and maintaining dynamic calendars of availability and skills, Bharat Intelligence attempts to smooth these mismatches.
Geospatial analysis tells the system which farms need support and when. Conversation data captured through WhatsApp and voice calls continuously refines profiles of both farmers and workers. The AI matchmaking engine then allocates people in ways that raise overall utilisation.
For farmers, the value lies in reduced uncertainty and lower transaction costs. For workers, the promise is more consistent days of paid work across the year. Merchant’s stated goal of enabling 300 days of wages annually for participants reflects an ambition that goes beyond simple matching into livelihood security.
Looking Ahead
With foundational technology in place, 20,000 acres already onboarded in Nashik, and a clear path to scaling active daily workers, Bharat Intelligence is focused on execution. Expanding the same model to additional crops and districts will test whether the digital-village approach and AI allocation engine can generalise beyond grapes.
If successful, the company could demonstrate that the shortage of reliable farm labour is not solely a problem of absolute numbers but also of information, coordination, and trust. By treating the workforce as a dynamic, data-rich marketplace rather than an informal and opaque pool, the startup is attempting to bring structure to one of Indian agriculture’s most persistent operational challenges.
In a sector where mechanisation is not always practical or affordable, improving the efficiency of human farm labour through better matching may prove one of the more immediate and scalable solutions available.