Agri-business venture is an emerging need in the country for seamless integration of on-farm and nonfarm employment. This present paper is an attempt to investigate the production, investment feasibility, and problems faced by startups. A stratified random sampling was followed and the startup producing a similar type of product was aggregated to make 4 (four) product groups and from each group 2 (two) startups were selected. The study revealed that the business of the selected women agri startups is economically feasible and viable. The findings show that the profit earned by the Group I startups is comparatively higher than the other selected startups. The cost of production resulted higher in Group II (` 62,92,221). The benefit-cost ratio based on variable cost and total cost resulted higher in Group I by 1.53 and 1.51 respectively. Major problems faced by the startups were due to lack of funding or capital, poor transportation facilities, lack of entrepreneurial development training, non-availability of skilled workers/weavers, lack of guidelines and technical assistance, etc. Hence, the help of incubators, financial institutions, and provisions of entrepreneurial training by the government can boost the growth of the business.

Highlights

• Manipur with vast natural resources has great potential for agribusiness activities.
• Value-added fruit products, meat and dairy products resulted to be a profitable business.
• Shortage of machinery resulted in the utilization of additional human resources leading to more employment.