October 31, 2019

By Lynda Kiernan

Omnivore Partners and Wavemaker Partners have led $1.6 million in Seed funding for Indian precision ag platform Fasal. Other investors who contributed to the round include Mount Parker Ventures, Hong-Kong-based Animoca, Japan’s Mistletoe via their Gastrotope accelerator, and existing investors Zeroth, AI-ML accelerator, and Australia’s Artesian Ventures.

Founded in Bengaluru in 2018 by Ananda Prakash Verma and Shailendra Tiwari, Fasal is an AI-powered platform that employs IoT and SaaS to gather real-time data from on-farm sensors that measure multiple variables including soil, microclimate, and crop health.

“So what growers need is – an excellent stethoscope which provides them the data and observations to make informed decisions about their crop and take the guesswork out of farming,” said Ananda Prakash Verma, co-founder and CEO of Fasal, in a company blog post last year. “That is exactly what Fasal does.”

Focusing on high-value and export-oriented crops, such as grapes, potatoes, onions, mango, citrus, tea, pomegranates, coffee, and chili, where crop success balances on produce quality and reducing chemical inputs, Fasal uses machine learning to transform the data it gathers into valuable predictions, red-flagging risks for producers while also helping them reduce operational costs, and optimizing crop protection, nutrition, and water usage. 

“We are on a mission to help horticulture farmers make data-driven, logical decisions and shift farming to autopilot mode. Farmers using Fasal are seeing major increases in profitability and huge water savings, even in the driest parts of Maharashtra. Ultimately, we will become a full-stack platform for horticulture farmers,” said Verma.

Currently, the startup has a presence in the Indian states of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, and it has plans to expand on a national level in India and into some Southeast Asian markets.

“We are very excited to be investing in Ananda and Shailendra from Fasal as they build a world-class solution for two core problems for horticulture farmers: managing irrigation and diseases/pests,” said Paul Santos, managing partner, Wavemaker Partners. “These problems plague Southeast Asian farmers just as much as they do in India, where the team has already seen early traction. We look forward to helping Fasal enter this region.”

The startup also will use the funding gained through this round to enhance its AI capabilities for each of its key crop value chains, to develop a lower-cost sensor that can be easily installed by any farmer, and to flesh-out its B2B2F (business-to-business-to-farmer) model sales team.

“We plan to help Fasal accelerate the growth of their B2B2F business model by connecting them to leading agribusinesses across the region and on-boarding the farmers they source from,” said Mark Kahn, managing partner, Omnivore Partners.

The market potential for this growth in India is very promising as the country’s farmers and agribusinesses have been rapidly adopting technology as a means to close the production gap that has been a constant in its agricultural sector. As of June of this year, the country’s agtech sector, which is growing at a rate of 25 percent per year, received funding exceeding $248 million, reflecting growth of nearly 300 percent year-over-year, according to a recently released NASSCOM report. 

“India’s agriculture sector is advancing steadily towards its digital transformation and the start-up ecosystem is playing a critical role here, bringing innovation and disruption in much-needed areas,” said Debjani Ghosh, president of NASSCOM. “Adoption of technology in agriculture has always needed a structured institutional focus and technology firms are trying to break into the agricultural landscape using newer business models.”

Lynda Kiernan is Editor with GAI Media and daily contributor to the GAI News and Agtech Intel platforms. If you would like to submit a contribution for consideration, please contact Ms. Kiernan at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.