Founder & Managing Director, Tech4Farm
TheCconnects: Venkatesh, your story is often described as “from soil to satellite.” Before we talk about technology, take us back to the beginning. What shaped you as a professional and as a person?
Nekkanti Venkatesh:
I was shaped long before I became an entrepreneur. I grew up in Yerramillipadu, watching my father wake up before sunrise, look at the sky, feel the soil, and make decisions that would decide our family’s future for the year. Farming teaches you responsibility very early. If you make a mistake, nature doesn’t give you a second chance easily.
I went on to study engineering, explored entrepreneurship, and even built ventures outside agriculture. But no matter what I did, farming stayed with me emotionally. Every success I had in cities felt incomplete because the people who worked the hardest-farmers-were still gambling with uncertainty. That realization eventually brought me back to agriculture, but this time with technology in hand and purpose in mind.
TheCconnects: Many founders chase markets. You seem to have chased a problem that followed you since childhood. When did Tech4Farm truly take shape?
Nekkanti Venkatesh:
The idea became real when I realized that farmers weren’t lacking effort or intelligence-they were lacking clarity. My father never complained about hard work or even losses. What troubled him was not knowing why something failed or what to do differently next time.
Around the same time, I was exposed to satellite data, analytics, and predictive technologies. It struck me that the sky farmers look at every day holds far more information than intuition alone can decode. That’s when Tech4Farm was born-not as a startup idea, but as a solution to a deeply personal problem.
TheCconnects: Your family plays a significant role in this venture. How important was that multigenerational involvement?
Nekkanti Venkatesh:
It was everything. My father, Tirupayya Nekkanti, has over four decades of farming experience. He understands soil the way a doctor understands a pulse. His insights gave Tech4Farm its philosophical foundation-respect nature, don’t fight it.
My brother, Nekkanti Vinod Kumar, brought scientific rigor. Years of field experiments, crop trials, and yield observations ensured that what we built wasn’t theoretical. Technology without ground truth fails quickly in agriculture.
This blend of lived wisdom and scientific validation is what makes our solutions trustworthy to farmers.
TheCconnects: Technology can intimidate rural users. How did you ensure adoption rather than resistance?
Nekkanti Venkatesh:
By designing with empathy, not ego. Farmers don’t need dashboards full of charts; they need clear answers-Should I irrigate today? Is pest risk rising? What will my yield look like?
Our third co-founder, Aswini Sai Putta, played a critical role here. She translated complex satellite and IoT data into simple, actionable advisories. Technology should amplify a farmer’s intuition, not replace it. Once farmers saw results-lower costs, fewer surprises, better yields-adoption followed naturally.
TheCconnects: Every entrepreneurial journey has its share of challenges. What tested you the most?
Nekkanti Venkatesh:
Trust. Convincing farmers to believe in something intangible like satellite intelligence is not easy. They’ve been promised miracles before. We overcame this by starting small-pilot farms, transparent results, and honest conversations when predictions didn’t go perfectly.
Another challenge was balancing scale with accuracy. Agriculture is hyper-local; what works in one village may fail ten kilometers away. Building systems that respect that complexity took time, patience, and humility.
TheCconnects: From your experience, what is the biggest challenge brands face in the digital agriculture space today?
Nekkanti Venkatesh:
Oversimplification. Agriculture is being sold as a “plug-and-play” problem, and that’s dangerous. Crops are biological systems influenced by hundreds of variables. Brands that don’t respect this complexity lose farmer trust quickly.
The real challenge is building adaptive intelligence-systems that learn from every field, every season, every mistake. Digital agriculture must be precise, local, and honest.
TheCconnects: How exactly does Tech4Farm address farmer pain points differently from other agritech platforms?
Nekkanti Venkatesh:
We focus on prediction, not prescription. Instead of telling farmers what to do blindly, we help them understand what’s likely to happen next-weather stress, pest emergence, water requirements, yield outcomes.
By combining satellite imagery, IoT sensors, and AI models with real farming wisdom, we reduce uncertainty. When uncertainty reduces, confidence grows. And confident farmers make better decisions.
TheCconnects: Awards and recognition have followed. What do they mean to you personally?
Nekkanti Venkatesh:
They’re affirmations, not destinations. Awards like “Visionary Leader in Agriculture Technology” or “Agritech Company of the Year” matter because they bring visibility to farmers’ issues. But the real reward is when a farmer tells us he slept peacefully during a critical crop stage because he knew what to expect.
That’s success.
TheCconnects: Outside work, how do you unwind? Or is farming always on your mind?
Nekkanti Venkatesh:
I still spend time in fields whenever I can. That grounds me. I read a lot-biographies, philosophy, rural development literature. And I enjoy mentoring young entrepreneurs, especially those from non-urban backgrounds. Their hunger reminds me why I started.
TheCconnects: Finally, what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs, particularly those entering agritech?
Nekkanti Venkatesh:
Don’t start with technology-start with empathy. Spend time with farmers. Fail with them. Learn their language, their fears, their rhythms.
Agriculture doesn’t need flashy solutions; it needs respectful ones. If you can build something that genuinely reduces uncertainty for a farmer, scale will follow naturally.
TheCconnects Speaking with Nekkanti Venkatesh is a reminder that true innovation doesn’t erase tradition-it elevates it. Through Tech4Farm, he is proving that when soil wisdom meets satellite intelligence, farming doesn’t just survive; it evolves.
