Indian agro-tech startup ‘AgroStar’, based in Pune said that it has raised a dollar of 70 million (Rs. 527 crore’s) in Its Series D Funding Round to accelerate the growth of its technological platform via omnichannel expansion and market linkages.
This funding round was led by Evolvence, global asset manager Schroders Capital, Hero Enterprise, and UK’s development finance institution CDC. It also saw participation from existing Agro star investors Aavishkaar Capital, Accel, Bertelsmann, Chiratae Ventures, and Rabo Frontier Ventures. The Raine Group was the exclusive advisor for this transaction.
Shardul Sheth, co-founder, and chief executive officer of AgroStar said that “We are now doubling down on our omnichannel strategy to provide a seamless experience to our farmers across various touchpoints both digital and physical. We plan to utilize the funding to strengthen our tech platform, hire senior talent, expand into new categories, geographies and scale to over 5,000 AgroStar branded retail stores to fuel our omnichannel strategy. We will also expand our services to provide meaningful market linkage value additions,"
Founded by Sitanshu Sheth and Shardul Sheth, AgroStar is working on a mission of “Helping Farmers Win”. It leverages data and technology to solve farmers’ problems of access to good quality agri-inputs and bridge the knowledge gap owing to traditional farming practices. AgroStar today is India’s largest digital farmer network and Agri inputs platform serving over five million farmers across the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh.
The $50 bn agri-input markets are challenged with a lack of knowledge and access to quality products resulting in low crop productivity. AgroStar is addressing this gap and has built a multilingual content-led commerce platform for farmers. AgroStar is seeing rapid growth of its platform with its mobile App crossing the 5 million download milestone. Farmers use the AgroStar app to read and watch agronomy content, post pictures of their crop problems to get advice, share and comment on fellow farmer posts, use voice search to look for Agri products, and transact on the platform.
“The platform has seen a 10X growth in video content consumption over the last year. Our platform is easy to use for the Indian farmer and adds real value on the ground for them. We believe that this is just the beginning and foresee massive acceleration in digital adoption by 140 million-plus Indian farmers over the next few years.” said Co-founder and COO, Sitanshu Sheth.
