EM3 sold tractor work by the hour to India's small farmers

Two-thirds of Indian farms are smaller than a hectare, and most smallholders farm manually because a tractor or harvester costs more than their annual surplus. Farm labour is scarce and wages keep rising, so missing the right day for sowing or harvest is a direct income loss for millions of families.

In 2014, Rohtash Mal — 63, retired after 37 years in the farm-equipment industry — and his son Adwitiya founded EM3 Agri Services on a simple bet: sell the service, not the machine. Its Samadhan platform delivers the whole cultivation cycle — land preparation, sowing, crop management, harvesting — on a pay-per-use basis, billed per acre or per hour, booked through an app or call centre.

EM3 formalised the informal market of equipment contractors: a franchise network of Custom Hiring Centres with guaranteed service quality and transparent pricing, plus partnerships with the Rajasthan government and equipment makers. By the late 2010s it reported over 300 centres in Rajasthan, 24,000 farmers served and more than 200,000 acres worked.

Investors backed the mechanism: Aspada led a $3.3 million Series A in 2015, Global Innovation Fund and Aspada invested $10 million in 2017 (GIF's share $7.4 million of the $8.6 million Series B), and GIF added $1.4 million in 2020.

Sell the tilled field, not the tractor

Farmers pay for outcomes — prepared land, harvested crop — instead of depreciating machines

Franchise centres make the equipment network capital-light and locally owned

An app plus call centres reaches a largely offline customer base

Transparent per-acre pricing beats the opaque informal contractor market

When customers cannot afford the asset, sell the outcome: smallholders need their land prepared on time, not a tractor they own — pay-per-use turns capital cost into an affordable operating expense.

EM3 scaled its franchise model across Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, serving more than 24,000 farmers over 200,000 acres, and was taken into the Unreasonable Group's venture community in 2019. The company is no longer operating — Unreasonable lists it as out of the community — and there was no public exit; the pay-per-use insight was sound, but owning and managing a machine fleet at village scale never reached the profitability investors had hoped for.