Agritech startup DeHaat raises $12M to reach more farmers in India

DeHaat, a web based platform that gives full-stack agricultural providers to farmers, has raised $12 million because it seems to be to scale its community throughout India.

The Sequence A monetary spherical for the eight-year-old Patna and Gurgaon-based startup was led by Sequoia Capital India. Dutch entrepreneurial improvement financial institution FMO, and present traders Omnivore and AgFunder, additionally participated within the spherical. The startup, which started to hunt funding from exterior traders final 12 months, has raised $16 million up to now and $three million in enterprise debt.
DeHaat (which suggests village in Hindi) eases the burden on farmers by bringing collectively manufacturers, institutional financers and consumers on one platform, defined Shashank Kumar, co-founder and chief government of the startup, in an interview with TechCrunch.
The platform helps farmers safe hundreds of agri-input merchandise, together with seeds and fertilizers, and obtain tailor-made advisory on the crop they need to sow in a season. “We've got constructed a complete database of crop assessments to supply recommendation to farmers,” he stated.
DeHaat, which employs 242 folks, additionally helps them join with 200 institutional companions to supply farmers with working capital, and when the season is over, helps them promote their yields to bulk consumers resembling Reliance Recent, meals supply startup Zomato and business-to-business e-commerce giant Udaan.
DeHaat at present operates in 20 regional hubs within the jap a part of India — states resembling Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Jharkhand — and serves greater than 210,000 farmers, stated Kumar.

Shashank Kumar, Amrendra Singh, Adarsh Srivastav and Shyam Sundar Singh co-founded DeHaat in 2012

The startup has developed a community of a whole lot of micro-entrepreneurs in rural areas that distribute agri-input items to farmers from their regional hubs after which deliver again the output to the identical hub.
“We've got an app in native languages and a helpline desk that farmers, a lot of whom don’t personal a smartphone, use to succeed in out to us and clarify their ache factors and wishes,” he stated.
DeHaat doesn't cost any charge for its advisory, however takes a minimize each time farmers use its platform to purchase agri-inputs or promote their crop yields.
The startup will use the recent capital to increase its community to 2,000 rural retail centres, on-board extra micro-entrepreneurs for last-mile supply and attain 1 million farmers by June of subsequent 12 months, stated Kumar. DeHaat can also be engaged on automating its provide chain and growing extra refined information analytics, he stated.
At stake is India’s agriculture market that's price $350 billion and serves practically 100 million small and impartial farmers, stated Abhishek Mohan, VP at Sequoia Capital India, the VC fund that writes more checks than anyone else in the country.
“This trade is on the point of an enormous transformation due to ease of regulation, farmers getting organized and growing penetration of smartphones. DeHaat is leveraging these traits to construct the next-gen product in agricultural provide chain,” stated Mohan in a press release.
“The tipping level that led to Sequoia India’s choice to associate with them was the sphere go to, the place the farmers expressed how proud they had been to be related to a platform they felt actually labored of their favour. This impression and deep model loyalty stems from the management workforce’s razor-sharp focus, deep empathy and superb execution,” he added.

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