A failed mango shipment to London led to Farmdar, a satellite data company now based in Singapore
Three childhood friends turned a family orchard problem into crop imaging. Five years on, Farmdar is headquartered in Singapore and backed by ADB Ventures, with sugar mills and crop science companies as customers.
Around 2015, Muhammed Bukhari's family sent mangoes from its orchards in Rahim Yar Khan to wholesale markets in London. The fruit's quality was weak. Six years later that failed shipment had turned into Farmdar, a company that sells satellite based crop data to seed makers, sugar mills and banks, and is now headquartered in Singapore.
From cold storage to satellites
The family's first fix was logistics. Cold storage and better packaging stretched shelf life, but they did not change what was in the box. Bukhari told a podcast hosted by Muzamil Hasan that this was simply "elongating the shelf life of a bad quality thing." The lesson he took was that quality has to be fixed on the farm, before harvest.
The family also owns wheat land near Sheikhupura and has grown sugarcane for mills for about 15 years, so it had fields to test on. Over about 18 months the team tried drones, multispectral cameras, sensors and satellite imagery. Satellites became the core of the business. Their images capture bands of light the eye cannot see, which Farmdar uses to estimate plant moisture, nitrogen levels and early signs of disease. A farmer can then water the parts of a field that need it instead of flooding the whole plot.
Bukhari says the family's own farms saw more consistent fruit, less fruit drop, roughly 50 percent less water use and about 30 percent less fertiliser. Those figures are his own account and have not been independently checked. He argues that Pakistan's water problem is mostly one of use rather than supply, since about 80 percent of its water goes to agriculture.
The yield gap as a business
Farmdar was founded in 2021 by Bukhari and two childhood friends, among them Muzaffar Manghi. At the seed round, the founders pointed to a gap in the national numbers. Pakistan is among the world's top 10 producers of sugarcane, wheat and rice, yet ranks around 50th or lower on yield.
The second problem was information. When the company raised its seed round, Bukhari described the data that farmers and lenders had to work with.
“Accurate data at scale doesn't really exist in Pakistan.”
Farmdar's answer was to build that layer itself, using high resolution, multiband satellite imagery and AI to produce crop data on productivity, yield, harvest loss and input costs.
Bukhari also argues that women make up about 60 percent of Pakistan's agricultural workforce and should be part of any push to raise productivity, and that closing the yield gap could make Pakistan a major food exporter.
Free for farmers, paid for by mills
The business splits in two. Individual farmers get a web app and weekly reports at no cost. Corporate farms, food processors and mills pay for more detailed data through bespoke analysis and subscriptions. Bukhari has said the free reports build a repository of farm data that the company expects to earn from later.
Sugar mills were the clearest early customers, partly because the Bukhari family knows that supply chain from the grower's side. A mill can use the platform to map crop types and cane varieties across a large area, replacing manual field surveys.
Farmdar has chosen to be a data layer rather than a farm services company. It leaves the fieldwork to agronomists, fertiliser firms and irrigation specialists. Bukhari describes the ambition as being a "Bloomberg for agriculture."
Three rounds of investors
In 2022 Farmdar announced a $1.3 million seed round led by Indus Valley Capital, with Deosai Ventures, Tricap Investments, United Distributors Pakistan, The Community Fund VC, LMKR and K2 Global Ventures also named as investors. NIC Karachi, the incubator that hosted the company, announced it. Farmdar was also the only Pakistani company in Microsoft's Growth X accelerator for the Middle East and Africa.
Aatif Awan of Indus Valley Capital, the lead investor, explained why the firm backed an agriculture company at the time of the seed round announcement.
“Agriculture is arguably the top sector in Pakistan to benefit from technology.”
The second round came in October 2024. A pre Series A round was led by Moment Ventures, a Silicon Valley fund, with Indus Valley Capital taking part again. The amount was not disclosed. The company said it had covered more than 350 million acres globally and that its clients had used its data to deliver precision agriculture to more than 200,000 farmers.
The third came on 11 November 2025, when ADB Ventures, the venture arm of the Asian Development Bank, invested an undisclosed sum, alongside Indus Valley Capital and Moment Ventures. Bukhari said the company was excited for ADB Ventures to join its "bold journey."
A Pakistani start, a Singapore base
The ADB Ventures announcement was datelined Singapore, which is now the company's headquarters. Farmdar also has teams in Thailand, Colombia, India, Brazil and Pakistan. Its two named products are CropScan, a crop insights platform that agribusinesses use for planning, and YieldPro, a monitoring platform for farmers and agribusinesses. They cover wheat, rice, corn, soybean, sugarcane, potato and other fruit and vegetables.
The customers named in the release include Corteva Agriscience, Bayer Crop Science, Thai Roong Ruang Group, more than 30 food producers including top sugar mills, and Bank of Punjab. Earlier, pilots with a Turkish conglomerate led it to ask Farmdar for a quote on work in Turkey, according to Bukhari. Its customers span seed and crop protection, fertiliser, food and beverage, machinery, agritech and financial institutions.
Arsalan Farooquee of ADB Ventures said Farmdar "harnesses satellite data and AI powered analytics" to tackle challenges in agriculture. The company has not published revenue, customer counts by country or the size of its last two rounds, so how much of its business still sits in Pakistan is not public.
ADB Ventures says the investment creates an opportunity to scale Farmdar's solutions across Southeast Asia. The money is meant to strengthen existing markets and start pilots in new ones. Farmdar has named Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam as the markets in South and Southeast Asia it is targeting.
