April 9, 2020

By Lynda Kiernan

Green Revolution, the Patna and Gurugram, India-based owner of online agribusiness platform DeHaat, has closed on a $12 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital India. The Dutch development bank FMO also participated in the round as did existing investors Omnivore Partners and AgFunder. 

This funding adds to $4 million in capital raised by the company in March 2019 through a pre-Series A round led by Omnivore Partners and AgFunder, and including additional angel investors and family offices. 

Founded in 2012 by alumni of IIT Delhi, IIT Kharagpur, IIM Ahmedabad, and other top institutes, DeHaat (which means “village” in Hindi) is one of agtech’s fastest-growing startups and one of the few offering an end-to-end platform providing farmers customized advisory services, agricultural inputs, financial advisory services, and marketing facilitation.

Leveraging AI-enabled technologies over the past eight years, DeHaat’s aim is to revolutionize supply chains and raise production efficiency by offering a full-stack platform of financial services, pest and disease management advice, a marketplace to sell crops, and access to buy more than 3,000 ag inputs. It also serves to aggregate corn, wheat, rice, fruit, and vegetables to supply to more than 200 retail, e-commerce, and food processor buyers.

Currently operating 20 regional hubs across Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Odisha in eastern India with a farmer network numbering 210,000, DeHaat’s goal is to expand its services to reach 1 million farmers by 2021 and 5 million by 2024. Through its network of hubs, the startup has created a role for entrepreneurial-minded actors, who distribute needed inputs to farmers, and in turn receive crops to the hub.  

“Sequoia’s deep expertise in business-to-business platforms and technology products combined with FMO’s expertise in agricultural value chain financing will help DeHaat accelerate its growth, while delivering massive impact for the farmers we work with,” said Shashank Kumar, co-founder and CEO, DeHaat.

The capital raised through this round will be used by the company to scale up its operations to 2,000 rural retail centers to handle last-mile delivery and farm produce aggregation, to further automate its supply chain, and to enrich its data analytics.

India is a top global producer of many agricultural products – producing 81.285 metric tons of fruit and 162.187 metric tons of vegetables, or approximately 14 percent of the global supply – according to the research article Scope of Supply Chain Management in Fruits and Vegetables in India, published in the Journal of Food Processing & Technology.  However, due to inefficiencies throughout the country’s supply chain, India sees food waste of up to 67 million tons each year – more than the total food production of Great Britain, reports Zee News.

Often in the agricultural investment field, challenges are seen as opportunities for innovation and return on investment – and increasingly, investors are seeing these inefficiencies in India’s supply chain as a means to not only have a positive social impact, but as a path to positive returns.

“Indian agriculture industry is over $350 billion in total and is powered by close to 100 million small and independent farmers,” said Abhishek Mohan, vice president, Sequoia Capital India.

”This industry is on the brink of a massive transformation with ease of regulation, farmers getting organised and increasing smartphone penetration. DeHaat is leveraging these trends to build the next-gen product in the agricultural supply chain.”

– 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.