Neetu Yadav and Kirti Jangra: Bringing the digital revolution to $250 bn cattle market industry

Kirti Jangra (left) and Neetu Yadav were roommates at IIT-Delhi
Image: Madhu Kapparath
Styling: Ankit Mishra; Wardrobe: Marks & Spencer
 
Neetu Yadav, 26
Kirti Jangra, 28
CEO and COO, Animall

Roommates while graduating from IIT-Delhi, Neetu Yadav and Kirti Jangra wanted to make a difference. And Animall, their dairy farming startup, became their means towards this. An online platform to empower dairy farmers across India, Animall started off as a weekend project in August 2019, and has today become a top-tier VC-funded startup.

 Neetu Yadav, Kirti Jangra, Anurag Bisoyi (UX designer), and Libin V Babu (senior front-end engineer), the founding team of Animall, started the venture in December 2019 in Gurugram. “Today, the largest dairy industry in the world is hungry for disruption, and at Animall, we are building for that positive disruption,” says Jangra.

Yadav and Jangra decided to start Animall after talking to thousands of farmers and learning that the cattle market in India is not only highly fragmented, but also unorganised. “This market spoke to us and was large enough to be challenging and exciting,” says Yadav. Animall started with a pre-seed funding of ₹50 lakh in January 2020 and, since then, Yadav and Jangra have raised ₹167.3 crore from investors like Beenext, WEH, Sequoia, Omnivore, Rocketship Nexus, and SIG.

“Dairy farming has been the biggest employment generator for rural India and we want to make that even larger,” says Yadav. In December, 180,000 cattle were registered for sale on Animall and over 1 million buyer-seller contacts were established.

According to Jangra, Animall’s biggest achievement is making online cattle trading, which was earlier taken as a joke, a mundane, everyday phenomenon for dairy farmers. With an ‘easy-to-use’ mobile application, Animall has empowered dairy farmers to start their own farms by gaining access to quality cattle efficiently and quickly. “After struggling for over a month, a farmer was able to sell three of his cows through Animall, within 24 hours. He later told us, ‘Yeh app nahin aandolan hai (it’s not an app, it’s a revolution)’,” recalls Yadav. “These words will stay with us because, at the heart of our business, this is exactly what we’re aiming to do, to bring 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, Sequoia Capital India, and an investor in the company.