Farm e-commerce start-up AgroStar raises $70 mn in Series D from Hero, CDC

The company has over 5 million farmers on its platform across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh

Digital farmer network and agri inputs e-commerce platform AgroStar has raised $70 million in its Series D funding round from Evolvence, global asset manager Schroders Capital, Hero Enterprise, and UK’s development finance institution CDC.

The round also saw participation from existing investors Aavishkaar Capital, Accel, Bertelsmann, Chiratae Ventures, and Rabo Frontier Ventures.  

Founded by Sitanshu Sheth and Shardul Sheth, AgroStar leverages data and technology to solve farmers’ problems of access to good quality agri-inputs and bridge the knowledge gap in traditional farming practices. The company has over five million farmers in its platform across the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh.

“The $50 billion agri-input market is challenged with a lack of knowledge and access to quality products resulting in low crop productivity. AgroStar is addressing this gap and has built a multilingual content-led commerce platform for farmers,” said the company.

Farmers use the AgroStar app to read and watch agronomy content, post pictures of their crop problems to get advice, share and comment on fellow farmer posts, use voice search to look for agri products, and transact on the platform.

“The platform has seen a 10X growth in video content consumption over the last year. Our platform is easy to use for the Indian farmer and adds real value on ground for them. We believe that this is just the beginning and foresee massive acceleration in digital adoption by 140 million plus Indian farmers over the next few years.” said co-founder and COO, Sitanshu Sheth.

AgroStar has also expanded its brand from being a content-driven, advisory and agri-inputs eCommerce platform to being an omnichannel platform with the rollout of AgroStar branded stores. These stores located at block levels across multiple states leverage the company’s  brand pull and the content and information-led approach to serve its farmers with additional touchpoints. It has ramped up its brand stores from 50 to over 1,000 stores in the last twelve months.

Shardul Sheth, Co-Founder, and CEO,  said, “We plan to utilise the funding to strengthen our tech platform, hire senior talent, expand into new categories, geographies and scale to over 5,000 AgroStar branded retail stores to fuel our omnichannel strategy. We will also expand our services to provide meaningful market linkage value additions for our large and growing farmer base and we will look at acquisition opportunities in this area.”

Sunil Kant Munjal, Chairman, Hero Enterprise said, “We at Hero Enterprise, believe that in addition to small industry, agriculture is the backbone of Indian economy with the largest part of the population engaged in this activity.  Digitisation and contemporary management practices can unlock tremendous value in farming.”