BalrajDeHaat, an agritech startup, has secured $115 million in a Series D funding round led by Sofina and Lightrock India. Temasek holding co-invested in the round alongside existing investors Prosus, RTP Global, Sequoia Capital India, and FMO.
Courtesy: DeHaat via Facebook
This is the largest round of funding ever raised by an Indian agritech startup. The current round raises the full-stack agritech startup’s valuation to $500 million to $550 million. The infusion of capital from the fresh funding round will be allocated to strengthen the company’s geographic prominence, boost investment in technical infrastructure, and maximize the range of financial services offerings.
Shashank Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO of DeHaat commented on the development saying, “We at DeHaat are on a mission of building the world’s largest agritech platform. We have raised $157 million from marquee investors in the last 30 months and our team has grown to a brigade of 850+ professionals.”
The Gurgaon and Patna-based agritech startup was founded by IIT, IIM, and NIT grads Amrendra Singh, Shyam Sundar, Adarsh Srivastav, and Shashank Kumar in 2019. DeHaat is a technology-based business-to-farmer (B2F) platform that provides farmers with full-stack agricultural solutions such as high-quality agricultural input distribution, customized farm counseling, access to financial services, and market integrations for selling their harvest.
DeHaat, which means “village” in Hindi, claims to have grown fivefold in the last seven months and has built a rural retail channel of almost 3,000 DeHaat microentrepreneurs for last-mile delivery. DeHaat claims to serve over 650K farmers in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Odisha. It seeks to enroll 5 million farmers on its platform by 2024.
DeHaat has been focusing on creating a digitized ecosystem of farmers as well as last-mile service providers and providing direct access to farmers through its physical and digital platforms in order to increase efficiency and transparency in this $350 billion market.
DeHaat has already started to expand into other regions such as MP and Rajasthan with a comprehensive suite of Agri solutions for farmers. Earlier this year, it acquired Farm Guide, a SaaS-based platform that provides satellite-based insights and guidance to farmers. The company also bought VezaMart, a platform that designs farm managing solutions for farmers.
More than 100 million farmers in India continue to struggle to gain access to vital commodities such as agri-finance, Agri input supply such as seeds, fertilizers, as well as farm equipment, alongside easy access to markets, which are mostly offered by agricultural value chains.
Numerous agribusinesses, on the other hand, are unable to market their inputs directly to farmers. Because of a complicated, multilayer supply chain, other businesses struggle to accumulate farm produce from farmers without passing through many intermediaries.
Farmers, who makeup 60 percent of the Indian population and account for almost 18 percent of the country’s GDP, are still a long way from being able to practice sustainable agriculture thanks to a lack of market access.