SUMMARY
The startup would use the raised fund to accelerate pan-India growth and refine the technology for an enhanced user experience
Krishify will accelerate monetisation on the social network via advertising, lead generation, and marketing services for companies targeting rural consumers
The startup claimed it is building ‘agriverse’, a platform where farmers and their families, retailers, traders, and agribusiness companies can seamlessly discover, interact, and transact among themselves
Agritech startup Krishify has secured $6.2 Mn in Pre-Series A funding with participation from agritech VC fund Omnivore and existing investors Ankur Capital, Omidyar Network India, and Orios Venture Partners.
With more than 6.5 Mn downloads and 1.3 Mn monthly active users, the startup claims to be India’s largest social network for farmers and rural communities.
It said it is building a platform called ‘agriverse’, where farmers and their families, retailers, traders, and agribusiness companies can seamlessly discover, interact, and transact among themselves.
The startup was founded in 2019 by IIT alumni Rajesh Ranjan, Manish Agrawal, and Avinash Kumar. Rajesh has worked as a product manager with Analytics Vidhya, and later cofounded Instano, a virtual shopping mobile app acquired by MagicTiger. Manish had worked as a senior engineer at Rivigo while Avinash was a UPSC aspirant.
Commenting on the funding, Krishify cofounder Rajesh Ranjan said, “We are excited to partner with Omnivore to build India’s agriverse. More Indian farmers are connecting via Krishify every day, as the network breaks down geographic barriers and helps people interact to access knowledge and do business.”
“We recently met a third-generation guava farmer in Rajasthan who was selling record numbers of guava saplings to farmers across Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra who only could have ever discovered him through the Krishify app,” claimed Ranjan.
The increasing smartphone penetration in rural India has created an opportunity to build a farmer-centric social network for India’s 130 Mn cultivators and their families, noted Mark Kahn, managing partner at Omnivore. Omnivore is a venture capital firm, based in India, which funds entrepreneurs building the future of agriculture and food systems.
“Krishify is building a content-centric agriverse to help farmers and rural communities realise greater success and joy through peer-to-peer engagement,” informed Kahn.
This AI-enabled startup had raised $2.7 Mn in August last year and has now secured the Pre-Series A round with additional $3.5 Mn funding.
Besides Krishify, agritech startups such as DeHaat, BharatAgri, BigHaat, Gramophone and others have made inroads into the farm advisory and input management market through various models.
These models have attracted a lot of VC funds in the past few years — more than $467 Mn has been invested in agritech startups between 2014 and 2020, as per the Inc42 Plus India’s Agritech Market Landscape Report, 2021.
Recently, a good number of agritech startups raised millions of funding to expand product and service offerings. Examples are plenty. Like, Indian grain commerce startup Arya.ag raised $60 Mn Series C funding last month. While B2B agritech startup AGRIM too raised $10 Mn in Series A funding just a few days back.
