This ex-wealth manager spent 11 years researching dairy & built GormalOne, a Mumbai-based dairy-tech platform for India’s 8 Crore farmers

India is the world’s largest milk producer, responsible for nearly a quarter of global supply. Every day, over a billion litres of milk is not just produced but also consumed across the country in various forms. While urban consumers see milk as a household staple, the economics behind it tell a deeper story. 

Dairy is the single largest agricultural commodity in India, contributing 5% to the national GDP. Additionally, for most rural families, cattle rearing is the most reliable source of daily sustained income. 

Therefore, with the rise of this sector, a parallel industry has begun expanding and taking a prominent place: 

> cattle health, 

> cattle productivity,

> dairy management technologies. 

Trade pundits estimate that the Indian cattle health market is currently growing over 8-10% annually and is driven by high demand for better cattle genetics, disease prevention and animal nutrition and digitised farm tools. Parallely, milk demand is also increasing creating pressure on small farmers (who make up 70% of dairy producers) to provide high-quality dairy products. 

Amidst such challenges, a dairy-tech platform has emerged called GormalOne, the company behind the platform NITARA. 

But their story did not start with technology, per se. It began with one man’s quest to solve a very simple problem: Why were farmers working so hard, yet earning so little?

Founder Background 

Manish Jain did not start as a technologist or an agricultural expert. He came from a lower-middle-class family and spent the first 13 years of his career in money management and mutual fund advisory. By 2006, however, curiosity pushed him into a different direction.

“I invested in India’s largest private-sector dairy, Hatsun Agro, purely as a curious investor,” Manish Jain said in conversation with Startup Pedia. “I started visiting their on-ground teams and saw how things actually worked. That changed everything for me.”

This turning point led to a deep research dive: 

• From 2006 to 2017, Manish Jain spent hundreds of hours studying how dairy operations functioned

• During this time, he witnessed something striking. 

Over the course of 11 years, he saw the lives of nearly four lakh dairy farmers transform. Better genetics, better cattle nutrition, and better management practices had dramatically increased their incomes.

“If four lakh farmers’ lives can change with just the right genetics, nutrition, and management, I realised India has eight crore such farmers. The impact potential was enormous.”Manish Jain recalls. 

That realisation set the foundation for what would eventually become GormalOne.

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A Co-Founder Joins

In 2017, Manish’s long-time colleague and chartered accountant, Amee Desai, joined the mission. Coming from a background in managing global taxation, she initially took charge of the financial side of the business. 

But within a year, she too was drawn into the larger problem Manish was trying to solve: Could technology unify India’s fragmented dairy ecosystem?

The pair believed that if they built the right digital platform, they could help millions of farmers escape poverty.

Five years of failure

From 2017 to 2021, their first attempt, called GormalOne, struggled.

“Those five years were only failures. We learned what NOT to do,”Manish Jain said in a candid conversation with Startup Pedia. 

The core idea initially was very simple: 

• build a digital platform 

• where farmers would input daily data 

• about their cattle. 

But the team soon realised the scale of the behavioural gap. By late 2020, they understood they needed a completely different approach.

In a candid conversation with Startup Pedia, Manish Jain explains why the idea did not work:“Asking a farmer to put data into an app every day is asking too much. It’s a behavioural change. We broke our heads for five years trying to make that work.”

The Turning Point

Instead of relying on farmers alone, the team shifted focus to the entire dairy ecosystem: 

• Vets, 

• Para-vets, 

• AITs, dairy companies, 

• Feed suppliers, 

• Insurance companies, 

• Banks,

• Genetics providers.

Anyone interacting with cattle could enter data once, and the entire ecosystem could use it.

To explain this, Manish used a simple analogy: “You go to a doctor when you’re sick. If you don’t get well, the next doctor has no idea what the first one did. The third repeats the same tests. We wanted to avoid that for cattle.”

At the centre of this idea was a belief: India could build a precision dairy system if the right data was captured at the right time.

This vision led to the development of NITARA.

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The Innovation

One of the team’s most practical innovations began with something as small as a semen straw: a tiny tube used during artificial insemination of cattle. 

Each straw carries 42 characters of information: 

1/ bull ID, 

2/ genetics, 

3/ batch number, 

4/ other details.

But there was still a catch: 

“Even with perfect eyesight and knowing English, you can easily make a mistake copying those 42 characters,” Manish Jain explains. “Now imagine 11 crore inseminations a year.”

So, their answer was simple: A farmer only needs to take a photo.

NITARA’s AI automatically detects:

• the bull used,

• the location,

• the timestamp,

• the geotag,

• and whether the insemination leads to pregnancy.

If the cattle conceive, the system automatically generates:

• a trimester-wise nutrition plan,

• do’s and don’ts for farmers, vets, feed providers,

• calving predictions, and

• management schedules.

If the cattle do not conceive, the system tracks repeat attempts. “The farmers just need to keep taking photographs. That’s all,”Manish Jain emphasises in his conversation with Startup Pedia. 

This simple interface, built for digitally inexperienced rural users, is one of the reasons the platform is gaining traction.

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Genetics, disease detection, and a ‘Dairy GPT’

Beyond just insemination tracking, NITARA has a broader vision.

India has 31 crore cattle, and the team has built individualised genetics recommendations for each animal, something not done anywhere else in the world.

They have also developed early-stage milk-based diagnostic tools. By analysing milk, the system can detect the onset of disease before symptoms appear.

Manish highlights:“Before the cattle fall sick, we step in. So the cost stays low, milk doesn’t drop, and long-term health improves.”

The team has built a local-language generative AI assistant called Gauguru, where farmers can ask questions in one language and receive answers in another.

The business model

Despite being in development for years, GormalOne is only now preparing to start revenue generation.

Progressive farmers (or ambitious small farmers) who want to scale will pay ₹1 per cow per day for advanced analytics.

Larger stakeholders like dairies, genetics companies, feed manufacturers, and insurance companies will have separate pricing models. 

The platform helps dairies increase milk procurement without increasing the number of farmers, reducing logistics costs and improving fat/SNF yield naturally.

The farmer’s basic access remains free.

The Product Suite

The company’s tech ecosystem today includes:

• NITARA Farmer App available in 12 languages, simple interface for small farmers
• NITARA Friend Appfor AITs, vets, para-vets, feed and medicine distributors
• FarmPro a large-herd management web app
• Dairylytics an AI-powered insights for dairies and related organisations

In 2025, NITARA won the International Dairy Federation (IDF) Award for Innovation in Socio-Economic Sustainability in Farming, recognising its global novelty and impact.

The name GormalOne itself comes from the words Goregaon and Malad, a poetic reflection of the early on-foot journey of Founder, Manish Jain - which led to the ideation of the firm.

“Farmers operate on razor-thin margins. Technology for them has to be simple, accessible, and affordable. That’s all we are trying to solve. India has eight crore dairy farmers. If we can get technology to even a fraction of them, the country’s entire nutrition security changes.”Manish Jain concludes. 

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