I joined this trade at fifteen. Everything we built came from what it taught me.

I joined the family sugar business in Kolhapur when I was fifteen. I learned the trade the way most people in this industry learn it, by standing next to my father, watching how a deal gets made, how trust gets earned, and how quickly both can be lost. That apprenticeship shaped everything I have built since.

The biggest lesson those years taught me is that business is ultimately about people. My father never believed in shortcuts. He sent me into the market to meet customers, to listen carefully, and to understand the realities they faced before offering anything. Patience, humility, and trust earned over time: that is the trade I grew up in.

What I noticed early was that sugar pricing in India was never the problem. Prices were public. What was missing was everything around the price. Whether a deal had actually cleared. Where quota stood that week. What a policy change in Delhi meant for a mill in Maharashtra. The information existed, but it was scattered, late, and often held by the few who profited from keeping it that way. I wanted to fix that, and I believed technology was the way to do it.

ChiniMandi came first, in 2018, because information was the gap I understood best. eBuySugar, AgriMandi, BioEnergyTimes, our conferences and our research followed, each one answering a problem the industry had carried for years. We did not build these from the outside. We built them because we had lived the problems ourselves, as traders, season after season.

That is what makes us different. Every platform we run was built by people who have traded sugar season after season. We knew the problems because we had lived them, and we built the tools we ourselves had needed. Forty-five years in the trade sit underneath all of it, and the industry can feel that when they use them.

The world around the trade has changed too, and faster than most of us expected. An institutional buyer purchasing sugar in tonnes today is the same person who gets a samosa delivered in twelve minutes on a quick commerce app. His home experience shapes his business expectations, and rightly so. Buyers now expect the same immediacy, transparency and convenience in commodity trade that they experience as consumers. Our platforms exist to meet that expectation.

Let me be clear about one thing: there is nothing wrong with trust. It built this industry, and it built our company. But trust alone has its limits as a business system. A deal that lives in one person's memory or one notebook is prone to human error. It assumes the trader never falls ill and never takes a vacation. When trust is backed by records, transparency and process, it becomes stronger, and it can be passed on. The trust was always there. Now it has infrastructure.

We are now preparing to take the company public. For a business that started as one man with Rs. 45 and a conviction, that is a significant step, and we do not treat it lightly. We have grown self-funded from the first day, and that patience shaped us: we see this company as an institution to be built and cherished, one that outlasts us and serves the industry across generations. Listing opens that institution to new shareholders, and we welcome them into a company that has always thought beyond its founding trade.

Sugar is where we began and where we proved the model works. It is not the limit of what we intend to build. The same approach, technology applied by people who understand the market from the inside, holds for any commodity that runs on trust, timing, and better information. Over the next decade, we hope to do in other agro commodities what we have started in sugar. What we carry into them is everything sugar taught us: how trade actually works, what builds adoption, and what earns an industry's confidence.

To everyone who has traded with us, read us, and built this industry alongside us: thank you. The next chapter is open to all of you.