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Athey Nallatha is a Kerala-based start-up that sells fusion pickles to both domestic and international customers. It is the first company in Kerala to accept cryptocurrency as a payment method.
Athey Nallatha is a Kerala start-up that sells fusion pickles to the domestic as well as the global clientele. It is the first company in Kerala which is ready to bring cryptocurrency for its payment method.
According to reports it is the seventh firm in India to choose Cryptocurrency-based transactions. On Aug 28, 2021, the start-up began its payment gateway by CoinBase to customers. Digital currencies which are accepted on these portals are Ethereum, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Bitecoin Cash, DAI and USDC. When asked why they added cryptocurrency as a method of payment despite other methods like cards, UPI and Google pay existing. Akshay Raveendran, co-founder and director of Athey Nallatha said, “The promoters have been involved with cryptocurrency right from the inception itself we used to keep track and invest in them. Also, if we implement blockchain technology on the operations side, it is going to save us a lot of money and customers are also going to benefit from this. There are major scaling plans but as a starting step, we have done this.”
Surprisingly the start-up doesn’t accept cash because of the on-going pandemic. Hafez Rahman and Akshay Raveendran are two management graduates who founded Athey Nallatha. They focus on giving employment opportunities to mothers. “We source vegetables and meat products from local farmers in and around Kochi. And during the initial days of the pandemic, we couldn’t group the people to work together at a single place to process these raw materials. Hence, we distributed the jobs between various groups of women. While one group handled vegetable peeling, another took care of cleaning fish. By the end, we collected the products and brought them to a centralized kitchen where it was prepared,” Raveendran said.
Athey Nallatha has at least 70 female employees from Panagad, Paravur or Thripunithura all places in and around Kochi. “We wanted to stimulate the local economy during the initial days of covid, the inter-state trade was disrupted and farmers were affected. So, we decided to source locally only,” said Raveendran. Athey Nallatha sells its products online via its website and Amazon.
