Agritech start-up AgroStar on Tuesday announced a fresh Series D fundraise worth $70 million from private equity investor Evolvence, Schroders Capital, Hero Enterprise, and UK’s development finance institution CDC. The round also saw participation from existing investors Aavishkaar Capital, Accel, Bertelsmann, Chiratae Ventures, and Rabo Frontier Ventures.
Founded by Sitanshu Sheth and Shardul Sheth, AgroStar leverages technology and data to solve farmers’ problems of access to good quality agri-inputs and bridge the knowledge gap owing to traditional farming practices. AgroStar today is one of India’s largest digital farmer networks serving over five million farmers across the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh.
The $50 billion agri-input market is challenged with a lack of knowledge and access to quality products resulting in low crop productivity. AgroStar is addressing this gap and has built a multilingual content-led commerce platform for farmers. AgroStar said that it is witnessing rapid growth of its platform with its mobile app crossing the 5 million download milestone.
Farmers use the AgroStar app to read and watch agronomy content, post pictures of their crop problems to get advice, share and comment on fellow farmer posts, use voice search to look for agri products, and transact on the platform.
“The platform has seen a 10X growth in video content consumption over the last year. Our platform is easy to use for the Indian farmer and adds real value on the ground for them. We believe that this is just the beginning and foresee massive acceleration in digital adoption by 140 million-plus Indian farmers over the next few years,” said Sitanshu Sheth Co-founder and COO of Agrostar in a statement.
AgroStar has also expanded its brand from being a content-driven, advisory and agri-inputs e-commerce platform to being an omnichannel platform with the rollout of AgroStar branded stores. These stores located at block levels across multiple states leverage AgroStar’s brand pull and the content and information-led approach to serve its farmers with additional touchpoints.
AgroStar has ramped up its brand stores from 50 to over 1,000 stores in the last twelve months.
Commenting on the recent round of funding, Shardul Sheth, co-Founder, and CEO of Agrostar said that the start-up is looking to double down on its omnichannel strategy to provide a seamless experience to its farmers across s both digital and physical touchpoints.
“We plan to utilise the funding to strengthen our tech platform, hire senior talent, expand into new categories, geographies and scale to over 5,000 AgroStar branded retail stores to fuel our omnichannel strategy. We will also expand our services to provide meaningful market linkage value additions for our large and growing farmer base and we will look at acquisition opportunities in this area,” he added.