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BharatAgri Harvests $ 6.5 Million in a Series A Funding Round

CIO Insider Team | Thursday, 16 September, 2021
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BharatAgri raised $6.5 million (Rs 47.7 crore) in a Series A fundraising round led by a new investor called Omnivore. Existing investors such as India Quotient and 021 Capital had participated in the round.

The Bangalore-based digital farm advisory startup is said to use the acquired capital to grow its subscriber base beyond Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. The company claims it has witnessed a 20x increase in paid subscription sales with a 65 percent renewal rate, has over 33,000 active paying users, and plans to reach 150,000 subscribers by March 2022.

Meaning that it’s aiming to ramp up aggressively during the rabi season and it also plans on accelerating the growth of its inputs marketplace and refine its tech offering.

Sai Gole and Siddharth Dialani, both engineering graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, established BharatAgri in 2017. Farmers can pay for customised agriculture and farming advice through the startup's technology solution, according to the company.

"It seemed unthinkable even three years ago that rural Indians would pay monthly membership fees to Netflix and YouTube, which is now the standard. BharatAgri has shown that the same can be done with farmers, who appreciate our advice platform so much that they are prepared to pay subscription fees”, states Siddharth Dialani, co-Founder and CEO, BharatAgri.

“We will be expanding our platform to provide more agricultural services in the coming months, starting with direct-to-farmer agri input supply”, says Dialani.

Commenting on the current matter, Mark Kahn, Managing Partner, Omnivore says that, "BharatAgri is the only agritech business in India to effectively monetise a wholly digital offering for farmers”.

Since traditional farming methods ignore changing climatic circumstances, diminishing natural resources, and the most efficient use of costly crop inputs. BharatAgri's patented algorithm gathers data on over 30 essential criteria to deliver personalized advice across a variety of commodities, including grains, pulses, fruits, and vegetables. Farmers benefit from a fully digital and automated solution that gives targeted insights at the right moment and regular crop monitoring at a reasonable price.

Likewise, Madhukar Sinha, General Partner, India Quotient notes that, ““BharatAgri is establishing a trust-based platform where farmers are participating meaningfully with their services. We've noticed that farmers in rural areas, particularly in agriculture, prefer to get all of their needs met from a single source, which is now an inputs store. BharatAgri has the potential to reproduce this on a digital platform, and it has already been adopted by tens of thousands of farmers”.

“We will be expanding our platform to provide more agricultural services in the coming months, starting with direct-to-farmer agri input supply”, says Dialani.

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