Prosus leads $30m Series C for India agtech start-up
Prosus Ventures, formerly a VC arm of South African media conglomerate Naspers, has led a $30 million Series C round for Indian agricultural technology provider DeHaat.
RTP Global, Sequoia Capital India, and local VC firm Omnivore Capital also participated. They were joined by Dutch development finance institution FMO and AgFunder, a specialist food and farming VC in the US. It follows a $12 million Sequoia India-led round last year billed at the time as a Series A. Total funding to date comes to about $49 million.
DeHaat operates a B2B marketplace for farmers that facilitates product distribution, operational advisory, access to financial services, and market linkages. The plan is to integrate a user base of as many as 10 million farmers with a rural network of last-mile service delivery centers. Currently, there are about 1,300 last-mile entrepreneurs and 360,000 farmers on the platform across four states.
DeHaat aggregates corn, wheat, rice, bajra, fruits, and vegetables from farmers on its network. Crops are directly supplied to more than 500 commodity bulk buyers, including retail chains, e-commerce players, large fast-moving consumer goods companies, and small to medium-sized food processors. The company claims to have experienced 3.5x annual growth during the past two years.
"We have been watching DeHaat for 18 months and have been impressed with the speed of development that the team is demonstrating,” Galina Chifina, a partner at RTP, said in a statement. “Agritech is exploding in India and DeHaat is building a unique infrastructure platform and is one of the only companies delivering an end-to-end solution for the farming community in India.”
Agricultural marketplaces have proven an attractive area of entrepreneurialism and investment in India, where some 140 million farmers contribute more than $350 billion to the national economy annually.
Other VC-backed players in this space include VeGrow, which focuses on small farm aggregation, and Bijak, a crop trading platform also backed by RTP, Omnivore, and Sequoia India. Last year, FMO joined a $32 million round for WayCool Foods, a similar farm-to-vendor marketplace.
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