Work
Series A investor deck for an agri-fintech
A studio concept: a 14-slide deck built around one argument — that lending to smallholder farmers is a measurement problem before it's a credit problem.
The category
Indian agriculture has a credit problem that is not a lending problem.
Around 30% of Indian farmers access formal credit. The rest borrow informally, at 24–60% interest, against 12–18% from agri-focused NBFCs. Meanwhile agricultural credit in India expanded from ₹8.45 lakh crore in FY15 to ₹25.49 lakh crore in FY24 — tripling without reaching the people who need it most.
The reason is structural, not malicious. Fixed monthly repayment schedules collide with seasonal income. Lenders have no farm-level data and no way to price risk. Rural transaction costs make small loans unprofitable. Farmers have no credit history and no collateral a bank recognises.
One line from the sector literature says it better than a paragraph: the credit gap exists because the system was designed for a different kind of borrower. That sentence is the deck.
The position
This is not a lending business. It is a measurement business that lends.
Every failed attempt at this market tried to extend an existing credit product to a new borrower. FarmKhata's argument is that the product cannot be extended — it has to be rebuilt around seasonal cash flow and farm-level data, and the company that can measure a smallholder can lend to one profitably.
An investor deck's job is to make one argument land. This is the argument.
Structure — 14 slides
Investor decks fail by being comprehensive. This one is built to be read in six minutes and to survive being forwarded without a presenter: title; the number (30% of Indian farmers access formal credit — full bleed, one statistic, no chart, no commentary); why (the four structural reasons); the reframe; what we built; how the data works; unit economics; traction; market, sized bottom-up; competition, including informal lenders as the true incumbent; why now; team; the ask; and a one-line close.
Slide 2 is the whole deck. If an investor remembers one thing, it should be that number. It gets a slide with nothing else on it, and the discipline to leave it alone is the hardest part of the design.
Typography and the dual-format problem
One family, three weights, no exceptions — regular for body, medium for emphasis, semibold for numbers, never bold, because a deck that leans on bold is a deck that has not decided what matters. Numbers get tabular figures, always: financial data in proportional figures makes columns wobble, and an investor reading a unit-economics slide with misaligned decimals is being told, quietly, that this team is not careful with numbers.
Investors read the PDF. They do not watch the presentation. Most decks are designed for the room and then emailed, which is why so many arrive as a set of headlines with the argument missing — it lived in the founder's voice. This deck is designed for the PDF: each slide makes its point without narration, with a headline that states the conclusion, not the topic. Not "Unit Economics" but "Contribution margin turns positive at loan four."
Colour and data visualisation
Near-black text on off-white, with one accent — a saturated green, used only on data, not brand green. No gradients, no photographs of farmers, no stock imagery of hands holding soil. Every agri deck in India opens with a smiling farmer at sunrise, and every investor has seen four hundred of them; the absence of that photograph is itself a signal that this team thinks the numbers are more compelling than the sentiment.
Charts carry the argument on the traction, market and why-now slides, and must be readable at a glance: one bar style, one line style, direct labelling, no legends, no gridlines. Cohort charts for repayment behaviour are the single most convincing visual available to a lending business, and the one most decks omit because they are harder to draw.
What this doesn't do
No appendix of forty slides. If it matters it is in the fourteen. If it does not, it is in the data room.
No "problem / solution" headers. The words themselves signal a template deck.
No TAM–SAM–SOM triangle. Top-down market sizing tells an investor nothing except which template was used. Bottom-up, from farmer count and loan size.
No team slide with eight advisors. Advisors on a Series A deck read as compensating for the team.
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