Keeping Up with Climate Tech vol. 11

In villages across the western Indian state of Maharashtra, smallholder farmers hunch over rattling diesel tillers, their arms and backs aching as the machines struggle across the uneven soil. Many suffer from health issues (pain in the back, neck, shoulders, and fatigue) and they see sky-high turnover. And their diesel-powered machines, which consume lots of fuel, break down often when they’re needed most, causing costly delays. Add to this their tiny, fragmented parcels of land and the impossibility of affording expensive tractors, and it becomes extremely evident that they and their counterparts across the country need a solution. They need it now. 

That’s where Orbit Agritech, a startup reimagining farm mechanization, comes in.  Its mission is simple but ambitious: build an electric, intelligent, and proudly Indian machine that makes farming not only more productive but also more aspirational. 

Sowing the Seeds

Orbit AgriTech was founded by Kedar Gokhale and Aishwarya Ramakrishnan, classmates from the 2010 batch of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Gokhale is a second-time AgTech founder and former senior leader at the Indian quick-commerce company Swiggy. 

Ramakrishnan, MBA ’16 from Harvard Business School, set up Krish-e, the agriculture technology arm of Indian industrial giant Mahindra. The duo brings over a decade of combined domain experience in the Indian agriculture sector.

Caption: Orbit Agritech co-founders Aishwarya Ramakrishnan and Kedar Gokhale. Credit: Orbit AgriTech

Gokhale and Ramakrishnan began ideating in the agricultural sector by understanding the needs of the hour. 

“After talking to many farmers and people in adjacent areas and doing our research, we found that the largest problem that farmers face in India is the cost of cultivation and specifically labor,” Gokhale said.

In countries with vast farms, he explained, labor accounts for less than 10% of cultivation costs given the large machines used. However, in India, it is nearly 40% of the cultivation cost.

At the same time, farm labor is evaporating. In the last 20 years, overall employment in agriculture has fallen from 40% to 23%. Ramakrishnan added that youth employment decreased from 34% to only 14%.

“There are a variety of reasons for this,” she said. “The youth are better-educated and have access to new technology and different opportunities. Many people do not want to do manual labor on farms anymore.”

Lifestyle plays a role too, Ramakrishnan noted. 

“The youth who stay back in villages have more time to themselves and are in a less congested environment,” she said.

Iterate, Iterate, Iterate: Detachable Batteries and Feedback from Farmers

Orbit began research and development last year by starting to electrify a variety of small machines which do weeding, spraying, and harvesting, with the goal of understanding how to go about creating a modular and scalable electric farm machinery platform with plug-and-play attachments across crops, soil types & regions.

Enter Orbit’s first machine, a 12-horsepower electric power tiller called the PT Pro, launched in March 2025. 

Detachable batteries have been key in the customer acceptance of the Orbit PT Pro, making it affordable and ensuring non-stop operation, especially during peak season.

“In any electric vehicle, the cost of the battery is the highest,” Ramakrishnan said. “So, instead of going with a fixed battery, we used detachable batteries so as not to increase the upfront cost for the farmer beyond a point.”

The detachable batteries are easy to use because most farmers are never too far away from a charging point. Every farm has a pump set for irrigation, for example, which has an electric connection where the batteries can be charged. The batteries can also easily be charged on a regular single-phase connection at their homes.

Caption (left): Orbit PT Pro with two detachable battery sets: one set under the hood and one set in the spare battery stand.

Caption (right): A PT Pro Customer taking delivery of the second battery set for charging on his electric two wheeler. Credit: Orbit AgriTech 

The detachable battery system solves a global scaling problem. 

“Electric tractors globally have not found product market fit because the power consumption and the discharge rate is so high,” she said. “You end up discharging a machine within one or two hours, and then it takes a minimum of six or seven hours to charge.”

In the case of the PT Pro, the machine’s discharge rate is equal to its charging rate. Thus, in two and a half hours, while the machine’s battery is being used to exhaustion, another set of batteries can be charged, enabling non-stop work. The batteries can also be used to power electric two wheelers and three wheelers.

Orbit’s early customers, upon encountering issues, actually ended up being hugely helpful design partners to Orbit. One customer reported an issue that Orbit’s engineer remotely diagnosed as an electrical component failure. The operator happened to be a local ITI-trained electrician. He not only quickly solved the problem but also recommended design changes for future models to prevent this issue from arising. 

“We could remotely do the root cause analysis, send him the replacement component reducing his downtime and our aftersales cost significantly and also iterate our design in prep for 2.0,” Ramakrishnan said. “It was truly amazing.”

Caption for the above pictures: Orbit PT Pro Delivery to Customer in rural Maharashtra in June 2025. Credit: Orbit AgriTech 

Orbit 2.0

The company is now preparing to launch its ground-up redesign. 

“In 1.0 we had only one motor and one controller. It was about achieving performance-cost-range balance, building our in-house R&D capacity, and validating that we were on the right track,” Gokhale said.

The next-generation Orbit PT Pro 2.0 is already in the testing phase. The team has developed a vehicle control unit module and simplified maintenance-free drivetrain, which will significantly transform the user experience and potentially set the foundation for a no-touch, hands-free machine in the future.

“Eventually, we hope to get to a point where there are several intelligent drive modes and real-time performance feedback,” he said. “Operator fatigue is a metric we obsess about and measure carefully. Our goal is to completely transform the way the operator engages with the machine and instill a sense of pride in owning and operating a new age machine.”

And throughout all of this, affordability is top-of-mind for Ramakrishnan and Gokhale. 

“This is a customer who is at the bottom of the pyramid, who never gets loans,” Ramakrishnan said. “If he does end up getting them, he always defaults on them. However, if you make the collateral something that can be financed, and you know what work the farmer is doing and if he’s earning money or not, it unlocks opportunities where people and institutions are willing to finance this machine.”

Early adopters are proving the model.

 “One of our customers bought the machine from us at a discounted price of 1.5 lakhs rupees ($1699)” Ramakrishnan explained. “The machine is usually priced at 2.5 lakhs rupees ($2839). He’s already broken even in the first month and a half of ownership. He can earn revenue of 25 lakhs ($16,999) over the life of the machine, and his opex is almost nil given the low charging cost and maintenance free design.”

Tailwinds and Differentiation

Orbit is not building in a vacuum; there are several forces encouraging innovation in the space. 

Demand for compact machinery was up 300% the previous year. And Gokhale shared that in late August 2025, the government reduced the rate of taxation on farm machinery. 

Ramakrishnan also mentioned Orbit’s several competitive advantages, with one being their in-house design and testing efforts, and their team, which is largely composed of children from farming families who have become engineers. 

“They understand the cause very well because it is personal to them,” Ramakrishnan said. “The common thread among all of them is just passion. Nothing explains them sitting until 2am, loading machines into a truck to take it to a customer. Only because all of us have been united in our passion could we have reached this stage.”

Caption: The Orbit AgriTech team at their assembly unit in Pune, India. Credit: Orbit AgriTech 

Ramakrishnan also said their swift market deployment — not spending three years on closed-door R&D but instead quickly putting a not-so-perfect product in the hands of farmers to get feedback — is an advantage teaching us what to do in future iterations. 

“From the outside, you can copy the machine, but you can’t copy the performance and the long lasting nature of it unless you follow our blueprint,” she said. “And of course, the final advantage is that we are operating in Maharashtra, which actually has some of India’s hardest soil. It’s called black cotton. If your machine works here, it will work way better in other geographies.”

The Orbit PT Pro can be used for intercrop operations in sugarcane, rice, cotton and ginger cultivation. Sugarcane is grown pan-India, as is rice. The machine can be used in much of Southeast Asia and any market with smallholder farming. It can even be used for hobby farming in Europe and the US. The team is also working on compatible attachments for other farming operations to drive better utilization and improve customer ROI.

Looking Ahead

Gokhale and Ramakrishnan describe the journey of being entrepreneurs as both grueling and grounding. 

“You invest two incredibly difficult years in just getting oriented, and these years are not always exciting,” Gokhale said. “Most of the time you are just doing things, building things, not knowing where it will lead. You have to be at it. You need patience. You need the hope that, at some point, your idea will break through and see the light of the day.”

With Orbit 2.0 slated for release in December, the company hopes to demonstrate that small, smart, and electric machines can transform smallholder farming. Ramakrishnan and Gokhale said it is not just a bet on technology, but also on pride, affordability, and persistence:

“At Orbit AgriTech, we don’t wait for the future of farming. We build it.”