B2B Agriculture Platform Agrim Raises $10M
Indian business-to-business (B2B) platform Agrim, which works for agri-inputs, has raised $10 million in a Series A round, according to a Friday (Feb. 18) press release.
Agrim is working on a digital platform for the $50 billion agri-input industry in India, connecting retailers with manufacturers and providing all parties with distributions, credit logistics and marketing solutions.
The company works with everything including seeds, fertilizer, crop protection, animal nutrition and farm implements. The new funding will allow Agrim to hire additional talent, develop FinTech products and scale up operations.
The release says Agrim’s plans also include adding more financial services to help both retailers and manufacturers with capital.
The round was led by Kalaari Capital. Some of the existing investors participating were Omnivore, India Quotient, Accion Venture Labs and Axis Bank.
Per the release, rural agricultural retailers often have several problems like limited goods, poor availability, opaque pricing, spurious product quality and big costs for working capital. Manufacturers also have trouble managing capital, growing their businesses and bolstering the penetration of their products across various geographies.
“In the last 15 months, we have achieved product-market fit,” said Mukul Garg, co-founder and CEO of Agrim. “This investment will help us expand exponentially into new categories and geographies. Given the unit-level profitability, most funds will be used to bring rock stars onboard and launch embedded FinTech services for our retailers.”
AgriTech has been gaining traction in the world of B2B, with Cholsas, an agriculture B2B eCommerce market, also working on similar goals in Zimbabwe, PYMNTS reported last month.
See also: Zimbabwe’s AgriTech Startup Cholsas Aims to Connect Farmers, Markets and Suppliers
Zimbabwe’s economy has farming on every tax bracket, with some doing it as a side hustle, some being smallholder farmers with it as their main income and others being larger commercial operations. All of them need suppliers and markets to do business, which can be problematic for smaller operations.