Agritech startup, AgNext Technologies, on Thursday said that it has raised $21 million as a part of its Series A funding round led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI) fund,
Existing investors including Omnivore and Kalaari Capital also participated as a part of the Series A round.
AgNext is also AWI’s first investment in India’s growing agritech sector.
With this new capital infusion, AgNext will now enter newer commodities, strengthen pan-India presence and expand to international markets including the Middle East, Europe, and South Asia.
Additionally, the company will also establish a new office in Abu Dhabi for deeper penetration into the targeted markets by diversifying its commodities portfolio.
Founded in 2016, AgNext Technologies provides deep-tech enabled solutions for food quality assessment, monitoring, and management. The company has innovated full-stack solutions, based on a unique integration of adaptive hardware, integrated software, and data analytics, which aim to solve quality-related issues in the post-harvest agriculture value chain.
“The deep-tech enabled value created by AgNext for our partners has been instrumental in driving our growth story. Today, we are ready to scale our operations globally and delighted to partner with Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI), to accelerate our R&D initiatives and build a robust international presence,” said Taranjeet Singh Bhamra, founder and chief executive officer of AgNext.
The lack of quality assessment solutions leads to approximately $90 billion in losses globally in agricultural trade, according to the company.
“With its unique deep-tech solutions, AgNext is poised to transform the agri-value chain at a global scale. We were very impressed by the depth of technological innovation shown by the company in building its AI platform. Further, the quality of clients and traction shown by the company on its commercialization journey is a strong validation of the company’s technology product suite,” said Anirudh Singh, managing director at Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI) fund.
The company has collected over 2 million food samples over the last four years across multiple categories, creating unique and massive artificial datasets, it said.
“Since inception, AgNext has done ground-breaking work in collecting millions of unique data sets for multiple commodities. By focusing initial years on refining their deep-tech solutions, they have been successful in building unique AI-based technologies and delivering exponential value to all stakeholders. We continue to back AgNext in their mission to change the paradigm of rapid quality estimation of commodities and enabling quality based trade across geographies,” said Subhadeep Sanyal, partner at Omnivore.
Source: Mint