India holds around 60% of rural Indian households making their living from agriculture. The agriculture industry here in India contributes around 17-18% to its GDP and around 130 million farmers and their families are struggling to get themselves out of poverty. However, in the last couple of years, there has been a rise in the number of agritech startups that are not only making technology more accessible but also helping these farmers to improve their lives, aiming to breakeven due to continued investor interest in more rounds of fundings. Agritech startups in India raised US$426 m, a 3x rise in comparison to the previous year. Investors say the agriculture sector was showing huge signs of technological disruption and did not have the potential to build scalable businesses that could impact India’s large agricultural population. This industry has the potential to reach about $24 bn in revenue by the year 2025.
Indian Agritech startups such as AgNext, the fastest-growing agri-tech company in India recently raised $21 million in a Series A funding round led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI) fund. AgNext is poised to transform the Agri value chain at a global scale. Farmers benefit from instant food quality assessment technology supported by AI-on-the-edge.
Unnati, a fintech-powered digital farming company offering end-to-end support for farmers raised $1.7M in Pre-Series A from NAB VENTURES. The amount raised by Unnati would be utilized for farmers such as – reforming the technology, seed buying, and guidance, buying nutrients and pesticides, harvesting and selling the crops, etc.
