Leaning on Legacy

A traditional business environment and realistic entrepreneurial outlook have helped in building a startup ecosystem in Coimbatore

- Sayan ChakraBorty

Eight years in Bengaluru until 2013 gave Selvakumar Varadharajan, 38, almost everything: Career, money, exposure to a cosmopolitan society, and the blues. The bling was blinding.

Renouncing a big city life would have taken longer had this humbling realisation not dawned upon him. “For people from smaller towns, with degrees from mediocre colleges, the growth is slow. The big cities, despite all their advantages, are for people with big academic and financial backgrounds. My thought was, let’s get back and grow with a growing city,” says Varadharajan, who quit his job as a college lecturer in 2013 and returned to the familiar terrains of Coimbatore, a city where his wife and he went to college.

Varadharajan, who grew up in Thammampatti, a town in Tamil Nadu’s Salem district, worked with a couple of educational institutions for the next three years before launching a farm-to-home dairy company, Layman Agro Ventures, which predominantly sells fresh milk and dairy products under the VilFresh brand. VilFresh, says Varadharajan, is unlike other new consumer brands to have hit the shelves in Bengaluru, Delhi or Mumbai. It’s a venture that doesn’t turn the basic tenets of running a business—sustainable growth and profitability—on their head, thanks to paucity of venture capital (VC) funding, a bane of being in a city like Coimbatore. “What if the fund doesn’t come? This threat always remains in small cities. So, the business is more bottomline-focussed than topline,” says Varadharajan.

That fear has been allayed. Earlier this year, Layman Agro snared 1.6 crore in angel funding from the Coimbatore chapter of the Native Angels Network, Sangam Ventures and Upaya Social Ventures.