Online agritech startup DeHaat, which connects small farmers with a network of small suppliers of farm input and equipment, has raised $12 million (about ₹83 crore) in a Series A funding round led by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital India, with co-investment from Dutch development bank FMO, a senior executive of the startup said.
The round also saw the participation of existing investors Omnivore and AgFunder.
“We are a farmers’ aggregator platform that connects them to different micro-businesses, including those who sell agricultural inputs and bulk buyers, along with banks and financial institutions. All these efforts boil down to providing a one-stop solution for farmers where they can get access to complete end-to-end services right from which crop to grow, to how to grow and where to sell the produce under one roof in an accessible and affordable way,” said Shashank Kumar, co-founder and chief executive officer, DeHaat.
“We plan to use the latest funds to expand our reach to more than one million farmers by 2021 by connecting them to a network of 2,000 such rural retail centres for last-mile delivery as well as farm produce aggregation. We will use some of the new funding to automate the supply chain and build the next layer of data analytics to drive further supply chain efficiency,” he added. Investment bank Dexter Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor to DeHaat. The startup showed a 3.5 times jump in revenue from ₹43 crore in FY19 to ₹135 crore in FY20. “We could expand revenue to ₹1,200 crore by fiscal 2022,” said Kumar.
The platform serves more than 210,000 farmers across Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Odisha and provides them access to more than 3,000 agricultural inputs, combined with artificial intelligence-based customized crop advisory content of pest and disease management for major crops delivered via mobile app and call centres.
