InfoEdge-Backed Agritech Startup Gramophone Raises $3.5 Mn

Indore-based agritech startup Gramophone has raised $3.5 Mn in an equity funding round. Existing investor Info Edge Ventures along with Raveen Sastry, cofounder, Myntra and Asha Impact invested in the round.

The funds will be used to invest aggressively on product, data science and scale operations across geographies. Prior to this round, Gramophone has raised $1 Mn from investors such as Info Edge, Ravi Garikipati, Chief Technology Officer of Flipkart; Ajith Pai, Director at Green Earth; Sanjay Ramkrishnan, former Senior Director and Head Product Marketing at Flipkart and Nitin Agarwal, VP, Wave Crest Group, among others.

Founded in 2016 by Tauseef Ahmad Khan, Nishant Vats Mahatre, Harshit Gupta and Ashish Ranjan Singh, Gramophone acts as a one-stop solution for all kinds of inputs for the farmers. Farmers can buy quality agricultural input products such as seeds, crop protection, nutrition, implements and agri hardware directly from the company’s mcommerce platform.

Gramophone’s agronomic intelligence provides a variety of farm management advisory solutions to farmers by leveraging the power of image recognition, soil science, smart crop selection and personalised information led cropping system. This enables the farmers to choose authentic and suitable farm inputs.

The company claims to have catered to over 2.5 Lakh farmers. It claims that plot level personalised insights enable a 15-20% average reduction in cost of cultivation, and a 30-40% increase in yield to smallholder farmers.

Kitty Agarwal, head, corporate development, Info Edge said that the company has shown tremendous growth and witnessed strong adoption among the farmer community since we first invested a year ago.

Kartik Desai, executive director, Asha Impact, said, “We were impressed by the Gramophone team’s intuitive understanding of customers needs, and by their ability to build a highly effective and scalable platform.”

A 2018 report from Datalabs by Inc42 showed that the total funding in agritech startups in India has grown from $46.1 Mn (INR 320 Cr) 2017 to $66.6 Mn (INR 463 Cr) in 2018, which is indicative of the growing investor interest in this sector.

With farming touted to be a $400 Bn industry in India, the market is big enough for startups in both the organised and unorganised segments to sustain and build scalable models. Some of the leading startups in the industry include Intello Labs, DeHaat etc.