Fintech-driven agriculture service platform, Unnati Agri on Wednesday said it has raised ₹60 crore in a Series A funding round from Incofin Investment Management, NabVentures, and Orios.
According to the company, it will utilize the fresh capital to augment its tech infrastructure and increase its uStore network.
Four-year-old Unnati is a fintech-powered digital farming company which provides necessary handholding to farmers across every stage of the farming cycle, such as working capital, seed buying, purchasing the right nutrients and pesticides for crops, harvesting, and even selling the crops.
Unnati assists farmers to follow the best practices in farming and brings to them financial products through the use of technology to reduce cost of service.
“Unnati has been committed to enhancing the lives of farmers as well as our retail partners through technology solutions. Unnati has built several innovative solutions to enable farmers and retailers to grow and scale their business, and our growth trajectory has been remarkable so far. We are happy to announce that we have raised our Series A round of funding and are thrilled to have marquee investors backing us in our journey,” said Ashok Prasad, chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder of Unnati.
The company has recently set up close to 20,000 uStores or digitally enabled retail points that enable farmers to enroll on the startup’s platform and get access to high quality, branded Agri inputs.
“We are delighted to partner with the high performance founders- Ashok and Amit of Unnati Agri as they scale a tightly knit strategy of an integrated rural ecosystem of knowledge based farm input advisory, financial inclusion and supply chain integration through the use of technology. Incofin looks forward to supporting them as they execute this unique combined agri-tech and fin-tech opportunity,” said Rahul Rai, partner, Incofin India.
Till date, Unnati has served more than 3 lakh farmers and has been digitising agri-input retailers, traders and other ecosystem players. Unnati claims to have grown more than 15-times over the last 12 months owing to an increase in its platform usage.
“As digital expands across India, one of its most important touchpoints is the Agricultural Supply Chain. Unnati is building a distributed model to optimize upstream supplies for the farmers and we are excited to partner with Amit & Ashok to build what promises to be an exciting business,” said Rehan Yar Khan, managing partner, Orios.
The Unnati platform is now looking at geographical expansion to Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and further expansion in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Maharashtra.
Source: Mint