Starting of at the age of 16, I developed a car that ran on Hydrogen without drastic conversions to the ICE engine. My project was selected for further research by the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. After spending 3 years in Spain i came back to India and got certified as an International baccalaureate teacher in the subject of Design & Technology.
After leaving the the Calorx International school that i worked at, i launched my first venture at the age of 22. There was a massive learning curve and barriers in the Entrepreneurial world. After 3 failed companies, the last one being a Leather exporting company that was shipping products to Detroit. I also got my first patent for a Non-Leather abrasive resistant jacket for motorcyclist.
Being an animal lover my self, there was always a conundrum while manufacturing Leather products. After shuttering this business down, I was on the lookout for a long term sustainable business.
During my research i came across the problems being faced by farmers due to climate change. Every year globally our crop outputs are decreasing on a YOY basis because of unseasonal rain and excessive heat being caused by climate change. This is already causing a global food shortage problem which is only going to get worse with every coming year.
According to a research done my NASA for every 1 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures we will see a 3-4% reduction in crop yields, we have already crossed the 1.5 degree threshold this year.
To solve these global food shortage problems, I launched Purple Farms in June of 2018. We started with nothing because the soilless farming technology available in our country is abysmal. India as a country is at least 15-20 years behind in global agricultural trends.
We stared our research in 2018 and developed our first prototype by March 2019. Post that we continued development as a self funded boot strapped company till 2022. In March of 2022 we received our first grant from the Govt of Gujarat, which helped us launch our pilot farm using Fogponics technology that we had developed over the years. This pilot farm then helped us secure our first round of funding which open in December 2023 and closed in October 2024 after raising INR 3cr from friends and family and Angel investors.
Using these fund we launched the world’s first Indoor vertical farm using Fogponics technology to grow our crops sustainably without the use of any herbicides or pesticides. We now have a domestic patent and an international patent for our technology and are planning on expanding abroad.
- Company:Purple Farms
- Short Bio:Founder, MD and CEO