About Varaha

• Varaha creates high-integrity carbon credits from nature-based solutions, including regenerative agriculture, ARR, and biochar projects, that promote climate adaptation, biodiversity, water conservation and increased income for smallholder land stewards.
• In our second year of operation, we are removing and avoiding over 1 million tons of CO2 emissions while we are distributing the majority of revenues to more than 100,000 smallholder land stewards across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Our cutting-edge digital MRV (measurement, reporting & verification) technology, including scientific modeling, remote sensing, and machine learning, ensures highest quality and verifiable project success.

Our Investors

We raised US$ 4 Mn in our seed round in December 2022, and US$ 8.7 Mn in our Series A round in January 2024. Our institutional investors include RTP Global, Norinchukin Bank, Omnivore, AgFunder, and several others.

Our Business Model: End-to-end, science & tech-driven carbon project enablement

We utilize smallholders’ natural assets to reduce and sequester carbon emissions and incentivize sustainable practices via carbon financing:

• Step 1: Varaha partners with on-ground organizations (e.g., NGOs, FPOs, Agri Input Companies, etc.) to develop carbon projects.


• Step 2: Carbon market financing helps in onboarding more smallholders. Varaha provides financial incentives, equipment and knowledge for smallholders.


• Step 3: Sequestered & reduced GHG are calculated using Varaha’s tech & generate high-quality carbon credits. Our projects are audited, and we sell the credits via B2B and B2B2B channels. The majority of carbon revenue flows to smallholders and implementation partners.

Our Project Types: Regenerative agriculture, ARR, biochar

We implement 3 types of projects:

• Regenerative agriculture: Holistic approach to farming that restores and improves ecosystems, soil health and biodiversity while enhancing crop yields and sequestering carbon.
• Afforestation, reforestation, revegetation: Planting trees and restoring vegetation to combat land degradation, enhance biodiversity, and mitigate climate change.
• Biochar: Production of carbon-rich, organic material through pyrolysis of biomass, offering soil improvement, carbon sequestration and sustainable biomass waste management. Biochar enables carbon sequestration for a period of >800 years, resulting in permanent removal.

We already have projects in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Kenya.

Importance of such solutions

• Need for carbon offsets to reach net-zero: As global corporations strive towards net zero, we provide the carbon credits they need to offset their residual emissions. We also help food & textile companies insetting, i.e., decarbonization of their agri value chains.
• Need to mitigate agricultural emissions: Agriculture contributes almost a quarter of annual GHG emissions. Smallholders generate 32% of these emissions, primarily due to conventional agricultural practices such as flooding, tillage, residue burning, and use of chemical fertilizers. We are reversing this.
• Need to bolster smallholder incomes: Smallholder farmer livelihoods are threatened by climate change-caused extreme events and land degradation. We increase their income through carbon credits, decrease their costs (e.g., reduced chemical and water use), and raise soil health to boost yields.

Future Outlook

• The global voluntary carbon market is projected to grow to $200 Bn by 2050, from ~$2 Bn today, driven by the need for the world’s largest companies to decarbonize and growing regulatory requirements. Hence, we see massive opportunities in developing and scaling our existing and new carbon projects.
• Food & textile companies increasingly need insetting solutions in order to decarbonize their agri value chains to meet Scope 3 targets.
• By our third year of operations, we aim to remove 3.9 Mn tons of carbon from 3 Mn acres of land across South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa. We want to be the go-to platform for nature-based offsetting and insetting globally.

Our Founding Team

Madhur Jain - Co-founder & CEO In his last assignment, Madhur served as the Digital business lead for IndigoAg and built three distinct business verticals and teams from scratch. He served as the first ‘India Country Director’ for PxD, which was co-founded by Economics Nobel prize laureate (2019) Michael Kremer. During his time, Madhur grew the smallholder farmer user base from 5,000 to over 615,000. Madhur has a background in Engineering and an MBA from Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad.

Ms. Ankita Garg – Co-founder & COO Ankita has worked for 10+ years in global companies including Bayer, Monsanto, Covance, and Genentech across the USA, Germany, and India, and has experience of leading business portfolios above >$100 million. Ankita, previously built and led another start-up, which involved the design and development of IoT sensors to provide farm-level customised advisory to horticultural farmers. She holds an MS in Biotechnology from Penn State University, USA, and an MBA from IIM – Ahmedabad.

Vishal Kuchanur – Co-founder and CTO Vishal has a total experience of 13+ years and has served as an Engineering Manager at category leading businesses from India, such as Flipkart, Big Basket and CropIn. He also had a stint at Goldman Sachs as a software developer. He holds a B.Tech in Electronics and communication engineering.

Background of Varaha

Founded in 2021, Varaha is a leading global climate tech startup that creates high-integrity carbon credits from nature-based solutions, including regenerative agriculture, ARR, and biochar projects, that promote climate adaptation, biodiversity, water conservation and increased income for smallholder land stewards.