Agritech Startup Krishify Raises Funding To Expand Farm Advisory, Networking Platform

Agritech startup Krishify has raised $2.7 Mn in a Pre-Series A funding round led by Omidyar Network India, Ankur Capital, and existing investor Orios Ventures. Country Delight cofounders Nitin Kaushal and Chakradhar Gade also participated in the round as angel investors. 

The startup will use the funds to continue expanding its user base and add to its monetisation channels. 

Founded in 2019 by Rajesh Ranjan, Manish Agarwal, and Avinash Kumar, Krishify is primarily an online advisory for farmers and agri stakeholders. It connects them through a common platform and looks to solve problems in market linkages for farming and dairy operations, farm input procurement and other challenges that typically come up in the agriculture value chain due to unstructured offline selling. 

Prior to this funding round, Krishify had raised around $150 K as part of its seed round from Orios Ventures and startup accelerator Appyhigh.

Krishify offers a content-centric networking platform along with a repository of farm-related information in local languages. The platform also provides advisory services on crop status, buying and selling livestock, farm machinery, seeds and more. Besides this, it connects retailers to farmers through a Krishify Dukaan app.

The startup, which currently claims to have 3.5 Mn users, is targeting a user base of 100 Mn and gross merchandise value (GMV) of over $10 Bn in the next three-four years. The company says it has doubled its user base — agri-stakeholders like retailers, cattle traders, breeders, and mandi traders — since March 2021. “This will be a new era in the networking platforms context, and we believe that a purpose-driven network like Krishify built around transactional use cases will dominate. In the next 12-18 months, we are eyeing over 10 Mn weekly active users,” cofounder Ranjan said.

Besides Krishify, agritech startups such as DeHaat, BharatAgri, BigHaat, Gramophone and others have also made inroads into the farm advisory and input management market through various models. These models have attracted plenty of VC funds in the past few years — over $467 Mn has been invested in agritech startups between 2014 and 2020, as per the Inc42 Plus India’s Agritech Market Landscape Report, 2021. 

The variety of models in agritech — even within the same sub-sector such as market linkage startups — makes it a vibrant sector. For example, through a last-mile network of 1,362 local micro-entrepreneurs, DeHaat is trying to bring several agritech services under one roof. It reported INR 135 Cr in revenue last year, a 3X jump from FY2019. 

As part of the coverage in the Inc42 Plus Agritech Playbook in late 2020, Krishify cofounder Ranjan had said, “Experienced farmers usually grow their hybrid varieties and sell the seeds to small farmers. They are farmer-micro entrepreneurs who find it difficult to reach out to other farmers. So, we have given them a platform to sell while small farmers get a platform to buy the best seeds.”

On the other hand, Bengaluru-based BigHaat connects input manufacturers with the farmers directly and provides stage-wise technical crop advisory services to farmers, while Pune-based BharatAgri connects farmers with produce buyers, offers advisory services, enables satellite imaging for monitoring farms remotely and several other features.

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