India's Agrim snags $17.3M to help farmers get inputs like seeds and pesticides more easily

by with No Comment Tech

Agrim founders

Image Credits: Agrim

Agriculture in India provides livelihood support to over 42% of its population, contributing 18% to the country’s GDP, according to government data. However, the agri-input market, which provides inputs for the sector — be it seeds, pesticides, herbicides, or cultivation and harvesting tools — largely relies on traditional channels, including local offline marketplaces. The sector lacks a robust supply chain, and logistics are complicated in remote geographies where most farmers are located.

Additionally, India’s agri-inputs landscape is different from that of the U.S. and Europe due to its fragmented market structure, diversified demand, and seasonal nature of crops.

Agrim aims to address all these discrepancies by building a just-in-time supply chain to help agri-input retailers buy inputs from a specific manufacturer.

The marketplace helps take the order to the manufacturing warehouse the moment it comes from a retailer, co-founder Mukul Garg said in an exclusive interview.

Garg, a second-time entrepreneur who co-founded the travel app Tripigator in 2013, founded Agrim along with Avi Jain in April 2020. He has also headed products and growth at logistics company BlackBuck and was responsible for building its on-demand trucking marketplace.

Agrim deals with retailers and manufacturers that have not used an e-commerce platform before, offering a minimalistic user interface along with the ability to let retailers set the pricing. The portal also includes a custom-designed order management system that allocates a manufacturer to every order it gets and ensures the pickup and delivery timelines are matched. Further, the startup works with multiple third-party logistics service providers to handle last-mile delivery.

The startup currently offers its catalog in four categories: seeds, agrochemicals, nutrition and tools. Each category also includes subcategories (600 subcategories in total), such as herbicides, fungicides and pesticides for crop protection, and 70 subcategories in the equipment segment, including hand tools and motor-operated tools.

Agrim uses a pricing intelligence model to set appropriate prices for products it gets from manufacturers. There are system algorithms to set prices based on factors including demand and supply to provide dynamic pricing on its platform. The startup takes anywhere between 10% to 60–70% of margins, Garg said, after giving a certain price to the manufacturer.

Agrim also offers lending to retailers, who usually do not get access to credit through traditional channels, and about 10% of its retail base currently uses that credit offering, Garg told TechCrunch. It hopes to grow that business to 30% of retailers in the next few years, in part by extending the credit period from 30 days to up to 45 days.

Now, the four-year-old company has raised $17.3 million in a new funding round led by Asia Impact. It plans to use its fresh funding to expand its catalog of agri-inputs from over 30,000 items to 150,000 in the next three years, and to expand to southern and western parts of India, including Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and some parts of Maharashtra, Garg told TechCrunch.

Similarly, the startup plans to expand its catalog by adding two new categories: animal feed covering cattle, fish and shrimp feed and testing out irrigation equipment.

Agrim also seeks to enter into the market of private-label agri-inputs within the next six months in order to help farmers get inputs at retail prices instead of paying a premium

“We are trying to democratize as a platform,” said Garg. “We are seeing a lot of demand and supply mismatches. So with private labels, we want to solve for unmet demand or supply.”

Agrim claims a base of 1,200 manufacturers and 25,000 retailers serving 15 million farmers. The startup generated over $36 million in the last financial year and is on the annual revenue run rate of nearly $60 million.

The all-equity Series B round also included participation from existing investors Accion Venture Lab, India Quotient, Kalaari, and Omnivore.

Exclusive: Kilimo helps farmers save water and get paid for it

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Farmers walk through a field being irrigated.

Image Credits: ridvan_celik / Getty Images

When people think about the water they use, they tend to think about drinking water out of the tap or maybe their daily shower. But about 70% of the water we use goes toward growing the crops that feed us, a number that swells to as high as 90% in low-income countries. Finding water for other uses can be a tough row to hoe.

In many areas, though, farmers are incentivized to use as much water as they think they need, even in excess to ensure a successful crop. “Governments want to produce their own food. They don’t want water to be expensive,” Jairo Trad, co-founder and CEO of Kilimo, told TechCrunch.

“But if farmers under-irrigate, there’s a huge risk of losing production and losing money and losing more food,” he added. “There’s an imbalance in the risk.”

Cheap irrigation has transformed many regions around the world into breadbaskets, but it also means that there can be little left for other uses.

For companies, water shortages can be an existential threat. “If you have a $200 million bottling plant and you don’t have water next week, there’s a lot of money at risk,” Trad said. “So we started talking with people and trying to put a value on water.”

What Trad and his colleagues at Kilimo devised can best be thought of as a risk management tool. So far, the company has taken around 100,000 soil samples across 45 different crop types in a number of different countries, mostly in South America. From there, it uses those samples to connect soil moisture to satellite imagery of farm fields, which is far easier to acquire. 

“You have to sit close to the ground to understand how things behave in that specific soil in that specific country,” Trad said.

Kilimo can then remotely monitor farm fields and advise farmers on their water use. It charges farmers a fee for the service, and if they’re able to successfully cut their water use, Kilimo can sell the surplus water to a company that needs it in the same watershed, sharing a portion of the proceeds with the farmer. In the end, farmers that trim their water use end up netting 20% to 40% more than they paid Kilimo. Everything is verified by third parties following the Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting standard.

Though the startup has been around for about a decade, it’s working to expand its operations as water scarcity rises to the top of executives’ lists of concerns. It currently works throughout South America, including in Argentina, where it is based, and Mexico. Next up is the Southwestern United States and Europe. To support the growth, Kilimo recently raised a $7.5 million Series A, the company exclusively shared with TechCrunch. The round was led by Emerald Technology Ventures with participation from iThink VC, Kamay Ventures, Salkantay Ventures and the Yield Lab Latam.

Kilimo is working with Microsoft, Intel and Coca-Cola, all of which have announced water pledges. (Data centers are large water consumers, as are beverages.) Trad hopes to sign more. “Each company alone is not going to make a difference. But if you can leverage corporations plus government plus development bank entities, there you start making a difference,” he said.

PIcture of one of Farmblox's universal monitors attached to a maple tree.

Farmblox puts the control into farmers' hands with its AI-powered sensor-reading platform

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PIcture of one of Farmblox's universal monitors attached to a maple tree.

Image Credits: Farmblox

Nathan Rosenberg, the founder of farm automation platform Farmblox, said if there is one thing to know about trying to sell technology to farmers, it’s that you can’t tell them what to do.

“[Farmers] are multigenerational,” Rosenberg told TechCrunch. “It is not a profession, it’s more a community, a way of life, and you need to respect that. You can’t come in as a Silicon Valley tech person and tell them what to do.”

Rosenberg said that’s why his startup Farmblox is approaching agtech a little differently than companies that have come before it. The startup created a solar-powered connected monitor; farmers hook it up to the third-party sensors they are already using, allowing them to track things like soil moisture levels and water waste in a less-manual way. That information is translated back to an AI-powered automation platform that farmers can check from anywhere.

“If you say I can increase your yield with this fancy AI thing, they aren’t going to believe that, but they will believe in not having to go out and check on this specific thing,” Rosenberg said.

The company signed on 55 farms in 18 months, and Rosenberg credits this to the fact that Farmblox gives farmers the control to customize and implement the systems themselves.

“It’s very important for us that the farmer install us themselves,” Rosenberg said. “We don’t do white glove service. Of course we are here if they need it, but they do it all themselves with very little documentation.”

Rosenberg said Farmblox is meant to help solve the biggest issue facing farms right now: labor shortages. Farmblox is meant to help farms reduce the number of people they need to work on a farm at a given time. He said that when he was a teenager, he had a part-time job on an organic farm that involved just walking around constantly to check sensors. It wasn’t efficient. Farmblox looks to automate that.

The company now covers more than 14,000 acres of farm land, with Rosenberg using his earnings as a top three developer on Minecraft to bootstrap the startup. Farmblox just raised $2.5 million in a seed round led by Hyperplane with participation from Slow Ventures, MHS Capital and Service Provider Capital.

Vivjan Myrto, the founder and managing partner at Hyperplane, told TechCrunch he got introduced to Farmblox at a startup event held by his Boston-based firm. Hyperplane had backed a handful of other agtech startups and through that, Myrto discovered that a growing problem for farms will be the increasing shortage in water.

While Farmblox isn’t specifically focused on saving water or water waste, it can help farms track that. The fact that the company has already seen the traction didn’t hurt either. “We were very impressed that this team has basically bootstrapped this from their dorm room to [more than] 50 customers in 18 months,” Myrto said. “In this industry, automating farms has been very costly and very cost-prohibitive. What is unique about Farmblox is the bay station is solar powered and very cheap. It has data and sensors that are way ahead of everyone else.”

Farmblox started with high-margin tree-based crops including maple, vineyards and orchards because the sensors can remain on the same trees after a harvest; with other crops like tomatoes, the whole plant is pulled up each season. Rosenberg said he expects the startup will move down into lower-margin crops in the future.

The company will use the seed funding to expand to more farms.

“We are building tools around not just monitoring and giving real-time data to the farmer but really connecting that with automation flows to create new and exciting bundles of solutions that they can deploy on the farm,” Rosenberg said.

Farmers walk through a field being irrigated.

Exclusive: Kilimo helps farmers save water and get paid for it

by with No Comment Tech

Farmers walk through a field being irrigated.

Image Credits: ridvan_celik / Getty Images

When people think about the water they use, they tend to think about drinking water out of the tap or maybe their daily shower. But about 70% of the water we use goes toward growing the crops that feed us, a number that swells to as high as 90% in low-income countries. Finding water for other uses can be a tough row to hoe.

In many areas, though, farmers are incentivized to use as much water as they think they need, even in excess to ensure a successful crop. “Governments want to produce their own food. They don’t want water to be expensive,” Jairo Trad, co-founder and CEO of Kilimo, told TechCrunch.

“But if farmers under-irrigate, there’s a huge risk of losing production and losing money and losing more food,” he added. “There’s an imbalance in the risk.”

Cheap irrigation has transformed many regions around the world into breadbaskets, but it also means that there can be little left for other uses.

For companies, water shortages can be an existential threat. “If you have a $200 million bottling plant and you don’t have water next week, there’s a lot of money at risk,” Trad said. “So we started talking with people and trying to put a value on water.”

What Trad and his colleagues at Kilimo devised can best be thought of as a risk management tool. So far, the company has taken around 100,000 soil samples across 45 different crop types in a number of different countries, mostly in South America. From there, it uses those samples to connect soil moisture to satellite imagery of farm fields, which is far easier to acquire. 

“You have to sit close to the ground to understand how things behave in that specific soil in that specific country,” Trad said.

Kilimo can then remotely monitor farm fields and advise farmers on their water use. It charges farmers a fee for the service, and if they’re able to successfully cut their water use, Kilimo can sell the surplus water to a company that needs it in the same watershed, sharing a portion of the proceeds with the farmer. In the end, farmers that trim their water use end up netting 20% to 40% more than they paid Kilimo. Everything is verified by third parties following the Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting standard.

Though the startup has been around for about a decade, it’s working to expand its operations as water scarcity rises to the top of executives’ lists of concerns. It currently works throughout South America, including in Argentina, where it is based, and Mexico. Next up is the Southwestern United States and Europe. To support the growth, Kilimo recently raised a $7.5 million Series A, the company exclusively shared with TechCrunch. The round was led by Emerald Technology Ventures with participation from iThink VC, Kamay Ventures, Salkantay Ventures and the Yield Lab Latam.

Kilimo is working with Microsoft, Intel and Coca-Cola, all of which have announced water pledges. (Data centers are large water consumers, as are beverages.) Trad hopes to sign more. “Each company alone is not going to make a difference. But if you can leverage corporations plus government plus development bank entities, there you start making a difference,” he said.

PIcture of one of Farmblox's universal monitors attached to a maple tree.

Farmblox puts the control into farmers' hands with its AI-powered sensor-reading platform

by with No Comment Tech

PIcture of one of Farmblox's universal monitors attached to a maple tree.

Image Credits: Farmblox

Nathan Rosenberg, the founder of farm automation platform Farmblox, said if there is one thing to know about trying to sell technology to farmers, it’s that you can’t tell them what to do.

“[Farmers] are multigenerational,” Rosenberg told TechCrunch. “It is not a profession, it’s more a community, a way of life, and you need to respect that. You can’t come in as a Silicon Valley tech person and tell them what to do.”

Rosenberg said that’s why his startup Farmblox is approaching agtech a little differently than companies that have come before it. The startup created a solar-powered connected monitor; farmers hook it up to the third-party sensors they are already using, allowing them to track things like soil moisture levels and water waste in a less-manual way. That information is translated back to an AI-powered automation platform that farmers can check from anywhere.

“If you say I can increase your yield with this fancy AI thing, they aren’t going to believe that, but they will believe in not having to go out and check on this specific thing,” Rosenberg said.

The company signed on 55 farms in 18 months, and Rosenberg credits this to the fact that Farmblox gives farmers the control to customize and implement the systems themselves.

“It’s very important for us that the farmer install us themselves,” Rosenberg said. “We don’t do white glove service. Of course we are here if they need it, but they do it all themselves with very little documentation.”

Rosenberg said Farmblox is meant to help solve the biggest issue facing farms right now: labor shortages. Farmblox is meant to help farms reduce the number of people they need to work on a farm at a given time. He said that when he was a teenager, he had a part-time job on an organic farm that involved just walking around constantly to check sensors. It wasn’t efficient. Farmblox looks to automate that.

The company now covers more than 14,000 acres of farm land, with Rosenberg using his earnings as a top three developer on Minecraft to bootstrap the startup. Farmblox just raised $2.5 million in a seed round led by Hyperplane with participation from Slow Ventures, MHS Capital and Service Provider Capital.

Vivjan Myrto, the founder and managing partner at Hyperplane, told TechCrunch he got introduced to Farmblox at a startup event held by his Boston-based firm. Hyperplane had backed a handful of other agtech startups and through that, Myrto discovered that a growing problem for farms will be the increasing shortage in water.

While Farmblox isn’t specifically focused on saving water or water waste, it can help farms track that. The fact that the company has already seen the traction didn’t hurt either. “We were very impressed that this team has basically bootstrapped this from their dorm room to [more than] 50 customers in 18 months,” Myrto said. “In this industry, automating farms has been very costly and very cost-prohibitive. What is unique about Farmblox is the bay station is solar powered and very cheap. It has data and sensors that are way ahead of everyone else.”

Farmblox started with high-margin tree-based crops including maple, vineyards and orchards because the sensors can remain on the same trees after a harvest; with other crops like tomatoes, the whole plant is pulled up each season. Rosenberg said he expects the startup will move down into lower-margin crops in the future.

The company will use the seed funding to expand to more farms.

“We are building tools around not just monitoring and giving real-time data to the farmer but really connecting that with automation flows to create new and exciting bundles of solutions that they can deploy on the farm,” Rosenberg said.

Exclusive: Kilimo helps farmers save water and get paid for it

by with No Comment Tech

Farmers walk through a field being irrigated.

Image Credits: ridvan_celik / Getty Images

When people think about the water they use, they tend to think about drinking water out of the tap or maybe their daily shower. But about 70% of the water we use goes toward growing the crops that feed us, a number that swells to as high as 90% in low-income countries. Finding water for other uses can be a tough row to hoe.

In many areas, though, farmers are incentivized to use as much water as they think they need, even in excess to ensure a successful crop. “Governments want to produce their own food. They don’t want water to be expensive,” Jairo Trad, co-founder and CEO of Kilimo, told TechCrunch.

“But if farmers under-irrigate, there’s a huge risk of losing production and losing money and losing more food,” he added. “There’s an imbalance in the risk.”

Cheap irrigation has transformed many regions around the world into breadbaskets, but it also means that there can be little left for other uses.

For companies, water shortages can be an existential threat. “If you have a million $200 million bottling plant and you don’t have water next week, there’s a lot of money at risk,” Trad said. “So we started talking with people and trying to put a value on water.”

What Trad and his colleagues at Kilimo devised can best be thought of as a risk management tool. So far, the company has taken around 100,000 soil samples across 45 different crop types in a number of different countries, mostly in South America. From there, it uses those samples to connect soil moisture to satellite imagery of farm fields, which is far easier to acquire. 

“You have to sit close to the ground to understand how things behave in that specific soil in that specific country,” Trad said.

Kilimo can then remotely monitor farm fields and advise farmers on their water use. It charges farmers a fee for the service, and if they’re able to successfully cut their water use, Kilimo can sell the surplus water to a company that needs it in the same watershed, sharing a portion of the proceeds with the farmer. In the end, farmers that trim their water use end up netting 20% to 40% more than they paid Kilimo. Everything is verified by third parties following the Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting standard.

Though the startup has been around for about a decade, it’s working to expand its operations as water scarcity rises to the top of executives’ lists of concerns. It currently works throughout South America, including in Argentina, where it is based, and Mexico. Next up is the Southwestern United States and Europe. To support the growth, Kilimo recently raised a $7.5 million Series A, the company exclusively shared with TechCrunch. The round was led by Emerald Technology Ventures with participation from iThink VC, Kamay Ventures, Salkantay Ventures and The Yield Lab Latam.

Kilimo is working with Microsoft, Intel and Coca-Cola, all of which have announced water pledges. (Data centers are large water consumers, as are beverages.) Trad hopes to sign more. “Each company alone is not going to make a difference. But if you can leverage corporations plus government plus development bank entities, there you start making a difference,” he said.