Dairy-tech startup - who has created a step counter for cows

In the last three years, the wearables market has exploded, and by 2022, consumers are expected to spend nearly $100 billion on everything from smartwatches to smart patches.

Now, a tech startup wants to expand into a new market for wearables: cows.

Stellapps, based in Bangalore, is a digital farm-to-consumer platform that uses technology to keep track of milk as it moves through the supply chain.

Ranjith Mukundan, co-founder and CEO of Stellapps, states, "We have a device that is like a Fitbit for cattle." He claims that the "mooON" device manufactured by the company “goes around the animal's leg and [tracks] their activity levels.”

According to Mukundan, cows move more when they are ovulating and less when they are sick. Stellapps creates reminders for routine procedures like vaccinations and artificial insemination by combining data entered by farmers and veterinarians into a smartphone app with data from step trackers. According to Mukundan, Stellapps' technology is currently used by nearly three million dairy farmers in 36,000 villages in India, accounting for over 13.5 million liters of milk daily. Healthier cows produce more milk, and farmers can increase yields by tracking and better managing their animals.

The company raised $18 million in October 2021, led by Nutreco, a Dutch animal nutrition company, along with existing investors Blume Ventures and the Gates Foundation

Milk is typically delivered by farmers in India to collection points in nearby villages. Here, Stellapps measures the nutritional content of the milk with an ultrasonic analyzer, enabling standardized price setting and providing farmers with updates on their cows' health and nutritional requirements.

Through its "mooPay" platform, the company transfers payments directly to farmers' bank accounts by measuring the volume of milk collected.

After that, similar-quality milk is combined and sent to a larger, centralized cold storage facility in 40-liter cannisters that have been digitally tagged. According to Mukundan, volume sensors monitor the milk at the unit to prevent it from being diluted or stolen. After that, the milk is transported to a processing plant, where it is either pasteurized, packaged, or made into products like yogurt or cheese

India relied on milk imports until 1970, when a rural development program called "Operation Flood" overhauled the industry. Dairy wasn't always a staple food there

According to Thanammal Ravichandran, a dairy economist and program manager for dairy at food producers ABT Foods, this reduced poverty in rural communities, made milk more affordable, and made it a good source of protein. Additionally, the program made India a "milk-exporting country."

According to Ravichandran, despite its size, India's dairy industry is still fragmented and largely unindustrialized. However, an Indian startup could revolutionize ocean farming with its "sea combine harvester." Small-scale farmers in India own between two and three cows, accounting for approximately 80% of dairy animals. In contrast, in 2020, the typical dairy herd size in the United States was 296 cows.

In 2019, dairy cows in India averaged five liters per day, while the top dairy cows in the United States averaged more than 30 liters per day.

Stellapps is not the only Indian startup using smart technology to modernize the industry. Prompt, like Stellapps, has made cow pedometers to track health and breeding cycles. Ravichandran also mentions Farmtree by Inhof Technologies, which uses data to figure out how much small farms are worth and how efficient they are, and Herdman by Vetware, which has a subscription model and can track data for more than one million animals. The business can be transformed by data.

Further expansion

Farmers pay nothing for Stellapps' technology and advisory services. Instead, it makes money off of its product by selling milk to cooperatives and other service providers like insurance and animal nutrition companies.

Mukundan claims that the business is also interested in the retail end of the supply chain. He believes that consumers who are concerned about quality will be drawn in by the development of a portal that tracks milk's origin and journey.

Mukundan hopes that by adding more dairy farms to the platform, he can make India's milk products more delicious and nutritious at the same time.