Agritech startup DeHaat has raised $115 million in Series D funding, led by Belgium based investment firm Sofina and Lightrock India. Temasek co-invested in the round, with participation from existing investors Prosus, RTP Global, Sequoia Capital India and FMO.
Based in Gurgaon and Patna and founded in 2012 by IIT, IIM & NIT alumni Amrendra Singh, Shyam Sundar, Adarsh Srivastav & Shashank Kumar, DeHaat is a technology-based business to farmers (B2F) platform that offers full-stack agricultural services to farmers, including distribution of high-quality agricultural inputs, customised farm advisory, access to financial services, and market linkages for selling their produce.
Shashank Kumar, co-founder and CEO, DeHaat said, “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 more than 850 professionals with deep expertise of growth and strategy, supply chain, technology and agricultural science.”
“Last 7 months have been phenomenal with 5x growth for DeHaat. Hence we are now well poised to replicate the success in all major agriculture clusters of India in next 12-15 months,” he added.
DeHaat claims to have built a rural retail network of more than 3,000 DeHaat microentrepreneurs for last-mile delivery as well as aggregation, serving more than 650,000 farmers located across Bihar, UP, Jharkhand & Odisha. The company has now started expanding to new geographies like MP & Rajasthan with multiple agri services for farmers.
As per the company, DeHaat has a strong commitment to continue investing in the technology. Earlier this year, it acquired Farm Guide — a SaaS based platform to provide satellite-based insights & advisory to farmers. The current tech team has grown to 120, building unique AI/ML based solutions related to crop advisory, last mile supply chain traceability & B2B SaaS agritech platform for input sellers as well as output buyers.
The company has raised this round within nine months of the last round, and has completed two strategic acquisitions so far for inorganic growth. Institutional investors Omnivore Partners and Pi Capital (family fund of Narrottam Shekhsaria Group) who invested in the first institutional round in 2019 have exited partially in the current round.
Vaidhehi Ravindran, partner at Lightrock India said, “We have been following DeHaat’s progress through the years and are impressed with their steep growth trajectory, combined with a strong network of micro-entrepreneurs. DeHaat has built the largest first mile network for farmers and is well positioned to help transform agriculture by improving yields and farmer income.”
Source: Business-Standard