Few startup stories capture the gap between India’s most prestigious engineering colleges and its most traditional rural industries quite like that of Neetu Yadav and Kirti Jangra, the co-founders behind Animall, a dairy and cattle trading platform that began as a weekend project and has since grown into a company valued at approximately ₹565 crore.
From IIT Delhi Roommates To Co-Founders
Neetu Yadav and Kirti Jangra met on their very first day at IIT Delhi and, just hours later, discovered they would be roommates, the start of a friendship that would eventually become one of India’s more notable founder partnerships. Both completed their B.Tech in Civil Engineering at IIT Delhi in 2016, a degree with no obvious connection to the dairy and livestock industry they would later disrupt.
Their entrepreneurial instincts showed up even during their college years. The pair ran a small prototype venture together, jokingly nicknamed the “Kirti-Neetu Cooler Company,” born out of necessity after they realized that using a regular cooler in their hostel could blow the fuse for the entire IIT Delhi campus due to the old electrical systems, prompting them to find a workaround.
Corporate Careers Before The Leap
After graduating, both women initially pursued conventional corporate paths rather than jumping straight into entrepreneurship. Neetu Yadav worked as a technology analyst at Citi before transitioning into product management roles, including a stint at the storytelling platform Pratilipi. Kirti Jangra pursued a career in consulting, working at Nomura Consulting and later at Penguin Random House India.
Neither founder had a professional background in agriculture, though Neetu’s personal history connected her closely to the problem they would eventually solve: she grew up in a dairy farming family in Nawalpura, Rajasthan, and the thought of eventually working on something connected to her father’s world stayed with her even during her corporate years. Kirti, meanwhile, grew up in a small town in Haryana and had even been accepted into an MBA program in the United States before walking away from it entirely to pursue Animall.
The Problem They Set Out To Solve
The idea for Animall emerged in 2019 as a weekend project, born from a simple but overlooked observation: while most consumer categories in India had rapidly moved online, cattle trading remained stuck in traditional, unorganized livestock markets, dependent on local traders, personal networks, and word-of-mouth. Finding a reliable buyer or seller, securing a fair price, and accessing trustworthy information about a cow or buffalo’s health and productivity was often genuinely difficult for farmers.
Yadav and Jangra spoke with thousands of farmers before building anything, discovering that India’s cattle and dairy market, then estimated at over $250 billion, was not only massive but almost entirely unorganized and unregulated.
Building Animall
Animall was formally founded in December 2019 in Gurugram, with Yadav and Jangra joined by co-founders Anurag Bisoyi, a UX designer, and Libin V Babu, a senior front-end engineer. The platform’s core proposition was straightforward: an easy-to-use mobile app that let dairy farmers list, browse, and trade cattle safely and transparently, cutting out much of the friction and information asymmetry that had defined the traditional market for generations.
One early story the founders often recall involves a farmer who, after struggling for over a month to sell his cows through traditional channels, managed to sell three of them through Animall within just 24 hours. He told the founders, “Yeh app nahin aandolan hai,” meaning “it’s not an app, it’s a revolution,” a phrase that has stuck with the team as a distillation of what they set out to build.
The Numbers Behind Animall’s Growth
Since its founding, Animall’s growth has been substantial by any measure:
- The platform has reached over 8 million dairy farmers across India
- It has facilitated the sale of more than 850,000 cattle
- Total gross transaction value through the platform has reached approximately ₹4,000 crore
- Around 80 lakh farmers are actively associated with the platform, with roughly ₹350 crore in monthly business conducted through it on average
- The company has raised a total of $24.7 million across five funding rounds from 38 investors, including Sequoia Capital India, Nexus Venture Partners, Beenext, Omnivore, and Rocketship
Beyond Cattle Listings
Animall has since expanded well beyond its original cattle marketplace function, adding services connected to animal healthcare, artificial insemination, and other forms of practical support for dairy farmers. This expansion reflects a broader ambition: rather than being a single-purpose trading app, Animall aims to be a comprehensive digital companion for India’s dairy farming community, addressing multiple pain points across the animal husbandry lifecycle.
Recognition And Industry Reception
Sequoia Capital India’s Rajan Anandan, an early investor, has publicly praised the founders’ insight into the problem they set out to solve, describing Animall’s potential to reshape a $250+ billion market that had historically been fragmented and underserved. The company’s rapid growth trajectory, from a hackathon-style weekend project to a business processing hundreds of crores in monthly transaction value, has made it a frequently cited example within India’s startup ecosystem of how technology can meaningfully transform even the most traditional, rural-facing industries.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Neetu Yadav Kirti Jangra dairy startup called?
Animall, a digital marketplace connecting dairy farmers to buy and sell cattle.
What is Animall’s current valuation?
Approximately ₹565 crore, according to reporting based on Times of India figures.
When did Neetu Yadav and Kirti Jangra start Animall?
It began as a weekend project in 2019 and was formally founded in December 2019 in Gurugram.
Which investors have backed Animall?
Sequoia Capital India, Nexus Venture Partners, Beenext, Omnivore, and Rocketship, among others, across five funding rounds totaling $24.7 million.