The Indian agritech startup aims to become one of the largest farmers, through integrating farmlands from growers on a cooperative basis
Indian agritech secures seed funding. (Credit: Pixabay/Catkin)
Vegrow, an Indian agritech startup that aims to aggregate small farms, has secured $2.5m in seed funding from Matrix Partners India and Ankur Capital.
Other investors such as Better Capital and Titan Capital along with angel investors including ITC Agri-Business Division CEO Sanjiv Rangrass, Cloud 9 founder Rohit MA, Livsapce founder Ramakant Sharma and Park+ founder Amit Lakhotia, had also participated in the funding round.
Founded by Praneeth Kumar, Shobhit Jain, Mrudhukar Batchu and Kiran Naik, Vegrow aims to build a large asset-light farm by partnering with small farms on a profit-sharing model.
The funding will be used to implement technology at a scale for higher yield
The startup claims that by using technology across different stages of the farming cycle, it can increase the net earnings for partner farmers.
Leveraging technology can help them in crop planning, giving them access to quality inputs, monitoring adherence to best practices and ultimately selling the harvest to the right set of buyers.
Vegrow co-founder Praneeth Kumar said: “Our collective experience of working on multiple agri initiatives led us to realise that, with the right set of tech interventions, farming can be a highly remunerative business.
“We validated this hypothesis by farming on our own, and in this process, we also developed a deeper understanding of the nuances of farming.”
All the co-founders of Vegrow hail from Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and claim to have an understanding of the agricultural sector. While Praneeth and Shobhit started their careers in ITC’s agribusiness division, Mrudhukar worked at Chronus as a product director.
Ankur Capital co-founder and managing partner RituVerma said: “We are excited to kickoff of our second fund by partnering with Vegrow. We have spent a lot of time in the agtech sector and most solutions do not get to the heart of the challenge – managing demand-led production across fragmented farms.
“The teams’ depth of understanding the market, coupled with their approach to use technology to drive the scale is what we feel sets them apart. We look forward to being part of the next phase of their journey and are excited to be partnering with Matrix and other investors and leveraging their experiences to build the farms of tomorrow.”