Journey of a man from village to owning Rs 80 crore turnover venture

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Prasanna Kumar, the creator of Vilcart, was born into a rural agrarian family with limited means in K Shettahalli hamlet in Karnataka's Mandya region.

Vilcart is a Bengaluru-based firm with a three-year history of working with rural Kirana retailers. The company provides everything a Kirana store owner needs, including atta, sooji, rice, sanitary pads, mosquito repellents, and biscuits.

Prasanna Kumar's incredible rags-to-riches story started in his hamlet, where his family lived in a two-room house.

He continued to become a chartered accountant after attending government schools, where he studied Kannada until Class 10. He had his accounting practice for roughly ten years.

He founded Vilcart in 2018 and closed his accounting firm the following year. Vilcart, which employs 85 people and has a revenue of Rs 80 crore, has expanded into 18 districts in Karnataka along with one in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in just three years.

They service approximately 30,000 Kirana owners in nearly 4,000 villages. They have a fleet of leased automobiles that are delivered from the warehouse to the Kirana owner by owner-drivers.

Vilcart operates warehouses in each of the 20 districts where it operates, with each warehouse covering a radius of approximately 40 kilometres.

Even though Vilcart offers an app, just 7% of consumers use it. The remainder of the customers put their orders over the phone.

Prasanna buys things directly from manufacturers and repackages them in smaller bags for Kirana proprietors. In addition, the company has established its line of spices, dishwashing liquid (Glin), detergent cake and powder (Aramane), and notebooks (brand name White Hills).

Vilcart has recognised and solved an issue that rural Kirana store owners experience in obtaining materials. On the Vilcart website, Mahadev, a Kirana owner, states, "The quality of products at Vilcart is finest and at the best possible price."

He claims that in the past, he had to close the shop for 3-4 days per month to go to the city to get materials.

Prasanna Kumar, 36-year-old, looks back on his past with pride. When he was younger, agriculture was his family's only source of income.

He studied in a government school in his village until Class six when he was sent to Jawahar Navodaya Vidhayala, a residential school in Mysuru run by the Indian government to help talented children in rural areas.

He passed the entrance exam and was accepted into the institution. The entire family was ecstatic. He struggled at first to acclimatise to life at the residential school, particularly in terms of communication, but he made some wonderful friends and led a disciplined life.

It was a pivotal period in his life, during which he learned to be self-sufficient and received the best possible education at no expense.
He then went on to Maharaj College in Mysuru to study Business Management (2002-2005). He travelled to Bengaluru to study Chartered Accountancy after completing his diploma.

He qualified as a chartered accountant in 2009 and was offered a job at an MNC with a salary of Rs 7 lakh per year, but he left after five months and opened his own CA firm in a rented 200-square-foot facility in Bengaluru.

He put in Rs 1.5 lakh into the business and furnished the office with used furnishings. He started with just one person, but by the time he chose to close the office in 2019 to focus on Vilcart, the company had grown to 22 workers working out of a 2000 square foot space.

When he initially went to Bengaluru to study Chartered Accountancy, he was amused by the fast-paced city life, which contrasted with the serene and peaceful village life he had previously experienced.

"They were aggressive founders, and I learned a lot from them," he recalls of the founders of two companies in particular.

As he began looking for business ideas, he was reminded of the hardships faced by Kirana proprietors in rural areas, whom he used to see on his daily commute of 20 kilometres from his village to his college in Mysuru.

After conducting basic research into the project's potential, he formed Vilcart Solutions Pvt Ltd in 2017. They reached out to village Kirana proprietors. They discovered that 97 percent of them purchased the products in neighbouring towns and chose to target them.

Prasanna Kumar persuaded the shop owners that they could place their orders over the phone and Vilcart would deliver the goods the following day.

They put Rs 80 lakh into the venture at the start. The company has raised roughly Rs 9 crore from angel investors thus far, which it has utilised to expand.

Prasanna Kumar is pleased with how things have turned out thus far. In the year 2013, he married.

The company is performing well, as they made Rs 17.5 crore last month and are on track to make Rs 400 crore this fiscal year.

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