March 20, 2019

Gurugram, India-based online agribusiness platform DeHaat has raised Rs29cr (US$4 million) through a pre-Series A round led by Omnivore Partners and AgFunder. Additional angel investors and family offices also participated in the funding.

Founded in 2012 by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi alumnus Shashank Kumar and IIT Kharagpur alumnus Manish Kumar, and owned by Green AgRevolution Ptv. Ltd, DeHaat is an end-to-end platform offering farmers customized advisory services, agricultural inputs, financial advisory services, and marketing facilitation. Manish Kumar later exited the company in 2015.

The platform has handled more than 20,000 tons of crops including wheat, corn, vegetables, and chili, while delivering 26,000 ag input orders, and 86,000 advisory exchanges to farmers over a three-month period.

Currently working with approximately 56,000 farmers across northern and eastern India, DeHaat intends to use the capital from this round to expand its reach to more than 250,000 farmers over the next 12 months. Plans also include the establishment of 14 regional warehouses for inventory storage, and geographic expansion into the states of Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh, for overall growth of three-to-four times over the next 18-24 months.

“We have built a scalable business model and data-driven technology platform to enable large stakeholders (including agri input companies, financial institutions and commodity bulk buyers) to transact with our farmers efficiently,” said Shashank Kumar. “Our goal is to reach one million happy farmers on the platform in the near future.”

DeHaat oversees a network of micro-entrepreneurs that each cover between 600 and 800 farmers across a radius of three-to-five kilometers. Farmers place orders through a mobile app, the DeHaat helpline, or by going to a physical location. These orders are forwarded to the appropriate micro-entrepreneur, who fulfills the order in the same day.

“These micro-entrepreneurs use our ‘DeHaat for Business’ application to enroll farmers, to aggregate demand, visit farms, capture crop-based queries, and aggregate the farm produce,” said Kumar.

Likewise, production-based questions are forwarded to a network of experts who address each challenge in real time.

“Our revenue comes from sales of farm produce to institutions and sales of agricultural inputs to farmers. We don’t charge farmers for crop advisory. Close to 72 percent of the overall revenue comes from the market linkage of farm produce and the rest from agri inputs,” explained Kumar.  

Funding rounds for agribusiness platform across India have very recently been booming. Within this month alone:

• Bertelsmann India Investments, the India-focused investment arm of German media giant Bertelsmann, led a $27 million Series C for AgroStar, a Pune-based agtech solutions platform. Existing investors who also participated in the round include Accel, Chirate Ventures, and Aavishkaar Bharat Fund.

• Aibono Smart Farming, an AI-driven fresh produce aggregator platform, raised $2.5 million in early stage funding led by impact investor Menterra Venture Advisors, and including The Artha Initiatives of Swiss impact investor Rianta Capital, Milliways Ventures from Silicon Valley, Rebright Partners from Singapore, and venture capital financier 3one4 Capital.

This is also the second investment for Omnivore Partners within as many weeks, after the firm led a $2 million round for Indian agtech and robotics platform TartanSense, along with Blume Ventures and BEENEXT. 

~ Lynda Kiernan