[Podcast] Thirukumaran Nagarajan on the first 500 days of Ninjacart

Thirukumaran Nagarajan is the Co-founder and CEO of Ninjacart, which leverages technology to re-imagine the fresh farm produce supply chain.

Today, Ninjacart delivers over 1,500 tonnes of vegetables and fruits to thousands of shops and retailers across multiple cities in India while raising the income of the 20,000+ farmers on its platform through fair prices. Ninjacart’s constant innovations in the supply chain were pivotal in ensuring a steady supply of fruits and vegetables during the nationwide lockdown to combat the coronavirus.

Accel's new podcast mini-series Untold Seed Stories aims to unravel the first 500 days of our founders’ startup journey — ranging from how they first conceived the idea and met their co-founders, to details of how they secured their first funding and challenges along the way.

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Notes

2:55 - Early life jobs and reflection on life

7:45 - Learnings from TaxiForSure work experience

16:30 - Building the founding team

26:00 - First meeting with Subrata, Accel at his home

36:26 - The major pivot to the business model

42:32 - Rapid fire round

Episode brief

Thirukumaran is a serial entrepreneur, who founded six startups including a coaching academy and a Biryani cloud kitchen before he landed on Ninjacart — which, interestingly, isn’t the same business as it was initially perceived. Though the first six companies failed to take off, he did not give up and kept charging ahead with one idea after another. 

His attempt at building these companies came with its set of learnings but his biggest learning of building a large, fast-growing company was from his stint at TaxiForSure.

“This is where I learnt how to build a culturally strong startup,” says Thirukumaran about TaxiForSure.

After the Ola acquisition, he decided to revisit his last startup, Shout, which was initially a location-based social network app. He decided to convert it into a location-based ecommerce app which eventually became Ninjacart.

Anand Daniel is a seed/early-stage venture investor with Accel Partners.