Making Hay

Ninjacart has made agritech aspirational even though its entry into agriculture was accidental. Now it is looking to leave a legacy for a lifetime 

- Vidya S.

THE END OF TaxiForSure in 2015 marked the birth of Ninjacart. The taxi aggregator, which Ola acquired in 2015, was the meeting ground for three of Ninjacart’s four main co-founders—Kartheeswaran K.K. (32), Vasudevan C. (39), and Thiru Nagarajan (38). “I was a Shout user and thought it was a nice app. A few weeks after Thiru joined TaxiForSure, I told him, ‘Machan! Do you know about this app called Shout? It’s a crazy thing, right?’ And he replied, ‘Dei, I’m the founder!’,” laughs CEO Kartheeswaran. Nagarajan had co-founded the hyperlocal social networking app with his former Commonfloor.com colleague Sharath Loganathan (40), who went on to become the fourth co-founder of Ninjacart. “TaxiForSure was a crash course in entrepreneurship where I saw how scale and commerce functioned,” says Vasudevan.

Each of them—all engineers from Tamil Nadu—nursed start-up ambitions, but their ideas were different. They met at TaxiForSure, realised they made a great team with complementary skill sets, and ultimately decided to launch an agritech start-up. As Ola was looking to acquire TaxiForSure, the three knew it was time to move on. It was TaxiForSure Co-founder and CEO G. Raghu’s encouragement that made them take the plunge into entrepreneurship.