KrisGunner

Old. Gooner. Tired. Casual learner of Causal Inference.

[Parimal @Fintech03]

S4S Technologies, Maharashtra, founded by the children of farmers who grew up watching their families' crops rot before ever reaching a market.

India loses 10s of millions of tonnes of produce every year to post-harvest losses, crops that rot / spoil between the farm and the market simply because smallholder farmers have no way to preserve / process what they grow in time.

Official studies (CIPHET / NABCONS) estimates put the monetary loss at around ₹1.5 lakh crore, with fruits and vegetables hit hardest.

Dr. Vaibhav Tidke (CEO), a farmer’s son from Beed, Maharashtra, together with Nidhi Pant and 5 ICT Mumbai classmates: Ganesh Bhere, Tushar Gaware, Shital Somani, Ashwin Pawade and Swapnil Kokate founded S4S.

The idea took shape around 2008-11, and the company was formally incorporated around 2013-14, not an outsider's hackathon idea, but people who had personally watched their own families lose income to exactly this problem.

Their core invention is a Solar Conduction Dryer, a patented, electricity-free device that dehydrates produce using pure solar heat, extending shelf life by up to a year without chemical preservatives, retaining 80-99% of nutritional value, at ~45% lower cost than conventional industrial dryers.

But the real insight came from failure: when they started selling dryers directly to farmers in 2014, farmers could not afford the machines and had no market for the dried product.

So S4S rebuilt the entire model, selling dryers instead to rural women micro-entrepreneurs, who buy rejected / lower-grade produce cheaply from farmers, process and dry it, and sell the finished ingredients back to S4S, turning what used to be waste into a genuine income stream.

The scale:

- A network reaching 100,000 smallholder farmers, supplying 1,400 women micro-entrepreneurs.

- Independent partner data (Acumen, 60 Decibels surveys) shows profit increases of 10-15% for farmers, with participating women's incomes 2x/3x in many cases.

- Up to 300,000 farmers and 2 lakh tonnes of food saved under their Moomba brand.

Early R&D ran on close to $1M in grants. Since then, S4S has raised real commercial capital from Factor[e], Acumen, Accel, Chiratae, and the Global Innovation Fund, including a Series B round and debt facilities, pushing total funding into ~$20M, a genuine VC-backed rural business today, not a small grant-funded pilot.

Why this matters for Bharat....

Most conversations about India's food-loss problem focus on top-down fixes, cold chains, storage infrastructure, MSP. S4S attacks it from the bottom up: turning the exact produce that would otherwise rot into a livelihood for the women closest to the problem, using nothing but sunlight and a dryer cheaper than the machines it replaces.

Children of farmers, watching their own families lose income to spoiled crops, built a company that has grown from a 2008 idea into a genuine multi million dollar rural supply chain, reaching 100,000+ farmers and 1,400+ women entrepreneurs, verified by Shell Foundation, Acumen, and the Earthshot Prize.

Modest origins, real scale.

Bharat is rising. 🙏🙏

[Arya’s Takes ॐ 🇺🇸 @AryasTakes]

I believe that the Hindu American community, along with the Iranians, are the only people that actually understand how Jews feel right now.

Hindus face an almost IDENTICAL onslaught of lies and misinformation, often proliferated by the same leftist activist pseudo- intellectuals.

These activists hate my Jewish brothers and sisters, and CONSTANTLY downplay the suffering of the Iranian people because it doesn’t fit their lousy anti-imperialism farce of an agenda.

Let’s bring the Iranian diaspora on board.

[Tathvam-asi @tathvamasi6]

Enough is enough

@VHPDigital should conduct massive #GharWapsi camps across the country.

If you agree, share it until it reaches VHP

[No Conversion @noconversion]

Hindus have memory like Goldfish... they forget everything very fast .. who can tell me what happened in TCS ?

[Radharamn Das राधारमण दास @RadharamnDas]

Do we Hindus still remember him.......?

[Adelle Nazarian @AdelleNaz]

This rise in anti-Jewish hatred has gotten out of control. What’s more? Hindus are increasingly targeted now by the very same groups.

It’s time for Hindus and Jews to unite against this madness and I’m proud to be playing an instrumental role in advancing this effort.

[Sai Deepak J @jsaideepak]

Have heard such moving reviews of #HanumanAnsh. Hope to watch it soon. So happy that such movies are being made. Kudos and congratulations to Dr. Visual Chaturvedi ji @filmervishal and the entire crew of the film. Jai Sita Ram. Jai Shri Ram.

[Ranvir Shorey @RanvirShorey]

While “cockroaches” are adding to the mess, the real Gen-Z are cleaning up! But I hope the local administrations and municipalities make sure these places remain clean!
It’s the least they can do! @PMOIndia @moefcc

[Daniel Bordman @DanielBordmanOG]

I can't take these people seriously, going to a Hindu temple to complain about the problems that Khalistanis and Jihadis are causing. This particular temple has been the focus of Khalistanis, Islamists and the handful of Neo-Nazis in Canada.

This stuff is cowardice dressed up in macho muh racism. Immigration and multiculturalism in Canada are controlled by Islamists, Khalistanis and the Left. All of them hate Hindus and India for various reasons.

So standing in front of a mandir to complain about the monkey statue is the most 3rd-world coded possible thing to do. While he might think he is being hardcore, I can see a man pandering to the worst of the 3rd world to safely complain against immigration by picking on the immigrants least likely to push back. Pussy.

[Maj Gen Harsha Kakar @kakar_harsha]

Seriously @SauravDassss there is no one dumber than you. If you think with a few days of media coverage you and your foreign funded joker pals @abhijeet_dipke and @AshutoshRanka can pose a challenge to the incumbent leadership, despite your foster father @ArvindKejriwal guiding you, you are mistaken. It is just a matter of time, before you are put in your place.

[KrisGunner @kris_gunner]

@ArunKrishnan_ @nsitharaman @vikramsampath @fihcr_info @LipikaB @PenguinIndia Wow congratulations! I have to start reading again.

[Arun Krishnan 🇮🇳 @ArunKrishnan_]

Got the Jury Special Mention for the SL Bhyrappa Prize for Historical fiction for my book, Daughter of Two Rivers, from the Hon. Finance Minister, @nsitharaman Ji, today.

Thanks to @vikramsampath and @fihcr_info for the opportunity!

@LipikaB @PenguinIndia

[Shantanu Gupta @shantanug_]

Saurav, I think you heard “Dimagi Naxal” and stopped listening. You missed the PM talking about AI, technology, entrepreneurship and India’s Gen-Z future.

Now your “education destroyed under Modi” thesis. Let’s fact-check it with 2014 → latest:

✏️On school closure:
- Govt schools: 11.07L → 10.13L. Yes, ~94,000 fewer—NITI says this reflects consolidation/rationalisation by STATES.

- Of 10.13L govt schools today, only ~2,158 are directly Central Govt-run. Calling every State’s school merger “Modi shut 1 lakh schools” is clever propaganda.

✏️On Dropout % (2014 vs Now)
• Primary dropout: ~4% → 0.3%
• Secondary dropout: ~18% → 11.5%
• Higher-secondary GER: 46.4% → 58.4%
• Girls’ higher-secondary GER: 45.9% → 60.9%

So please don’t sell cohort-retention data as a “73% annual dropout rate”.

✏️Infrastructure, 2014 → 2024-25:

• Schools with electricity: 56% → 91.9%
• Computers: 26.4% → 64.7%

Higher education:

• Universities: 760 → 1,168+
• IITs: 16 → 23
• IIMs: 13 → 21

✏️And your “education budget HALVED”?

Union Education/HRD allocation:
₹83,771 cr (2014-15) → ₹1,39,289 cr (2026-27) — roughly up by 66%, not 50% down.

@jhoothkigoonj

[Nandini @NBDwrites]

@drshamamohd @narendramodi Shama I have a ‘feeling’ they dropped you on your head when you were a baby.

[Stop Hindu Hate Advocacy Network (SHHAN) @HinduHate]

Whites are not natives to America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They are all brown countries. You are intolerant to one statue of a Hindu God while your missionaries are screaming outside Indian embassies to give them visa to India to convert the locals. You cannot have it both ways.

[Sidharth @Cloudwatch199]

Newsmax took roughly $50 MILLION from a Qatari royal.

His name is Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al Thani

Today, this “far-right” network deflects scrutiny by painting Hindus as the villains.

Foreign royal money is welcome.
Hindu Americans get smeared.

Put your investor list on screen before your next lecture about who threatens America.

Hindus are not your scapegoats.

The Red Green alliance now has media in both sides of the aisle.

[Ayaan Hirsi Ali @Ayaan]

I’ve spent years warning about the influence foreign money can buy in the West.

Qatar’s $6.6 billion investment in American universities demands sunlight. Every dollar, every agreement, every condition — make it public.

[Parimal @Fintech03]

Sunday Startup Story...

Uravu Labs, Bengaluru, born out of a hostel water crisis at NIT Calicut...

In 2016, engineering students Swapnil Shrivastav and Venkatesh R lived through a severe campus drought at NIT Calicut, rationed to just one / two buckets, 10-15 litres, of water a day.

That hardship is what pushed a dormant idea into an actual company. They placed in the top 5 of the Water Abundance XPRIZE in 2018 with a $50k grant, and formally incorporated Uravu Labs in 2019.

What they built, and why it is genuinely clever engineering...

Most water from air startups use fridge style refrigeration to cool air to its dew point, expensive, power-hungry.

Uravu instead built a liquid desiccant system: a hygroscopic salt solution absorbs moisture straight from the air through chemical affinity, then low-grade heat, solar thermal / biomass / waste heat from industrial processes, regenerates it into pure, mineral-rich drinking water.

No brute-force cooling required.

A little about the founders: Swapnil Shrivastav (CEO, B.Arch from NIT Calicut), Venkatesh R, and Govinda Balaji, with Pardeep Garg (a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from IISc with research time at MIT, as former co-founder and CTO).

Their systems are live in hospitality and beverage applications, including what is marketed as the world's first beer brewed with air-derived water, alongside Bengaluru's The Bier Library, plus an earlier pilot with AB InBev.

The company has cited conserving ~2 lakh litres of groundwater.

They have raised a $2.3M seed round in March 2023 (Anicut, Speciale Invest, Rocketship, JITO, Echo River, others), following earlier pre-seed money + a smaller 2025 round (~$1.2M) involving Enrission India Capital, AWE Funds, and Inflection Point Ventures.

Genuinely modest money for hardware heavy climate tech.

In June 2026, Uravu Labs was named among the Indian climate tech picks in Hub71's Cohort 18 in Abu Dhabi, a technology built and stress-tested in India, now being sought out by one of the most water-stressed, capital-intensive regions on Earth.

Why this matters for Bharat....

- Waterorg's current data puts the number of Indians lacking reliable access to safe drinking water at 34.2 crore

- a scale of crisis that Jal Jeevan Mission attacks through pipes and infrastructure, while Uravu attacks it from a completely different angle: decentralized water generation that needs nothing but air and sunlight, no pipe, no well, no river.

2 students rationed to a bucket of water a day during a college drought, building a company a decade later that a Gulf state now wants for its own water security.

Bharat is rising. 🙏🙏

[Ranvir Shorey @RanvirShorey]

Wow! Another Herculean effort by citizens that is worthy of applause, this time in #Haridwar. But the question again is, are our local administrations and municipalities so overwhelmed that they can’t deal with such issues? Or is it just plain apathy and corruption?

[Abhijit Majumder @abhijitmajumder]

Al Jazeera doesn’t mention that the mosque was built on district collectorate premises which is govt land.
You cannot demolish a temple or encroach govt land and build a masjid. You can’t take over roads and parks to pray.
You cannot piss anywhere and mark it as your territory.