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DeHaat gets USD 115 mn in Series D funding round

DeHaat raises USD 115 mn from investors for expansion, says company CEO

Business

DeHaat gets USD 115 mn in Series D funding round

Agritech startup DeHaat has raised USD 115 million (around Rs 860 crore) from investors including Sofina and Lightrock India in order to expand its operations and invest in new technology.



Founded in 2012 and based in Gurugram and Patna, DeHaat is a technology-based platform offering end-to-end agricultural services to farmers. It has been founded by IIT, IIM and NIT alumni Amrendra Singh, Shyam Sundar, Adarsh Srivastav and Shashank Kumar. “We have raised USD 115 million in Series D round of funding,” DeHaat co-founder and CEO Shashank Kumar told PTI in an interview.


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The round was led by Belgium-based investment firm Sofina and Lightrock India. Temasek co-invested in the round, with participation from existing investors Prosus, RTP Global, Sequoia Capital India and FMO. With the fresh round of funding, Kumar said the company has raised around USD 160 million (about Rs 1,198 crore).

He did not disclose the valuation at which the funds have been raised. “We will utilise the funds to expand our operations in new states like Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Maharashtra,” he said. That apart, Kumar said the proceeds would be utilised on new technology and to introduce more value-added services. DeHaat is a technology-based business to farmers (B2F) platform that offers full-stack agricultural services to farmers, including distribution of farm inputs, crop advisory, access to financial services, and market linkages for selling their produce.

“We provide free crop advisory to farmers. We also supply quality inputs at reasonable price and also procure farm produces at prevailing market rates,” Kumar said. It purchases around 30 agri products currently. Around 7 lakh farmers across various states, including Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, are already associated with the platform, he said. “We at DeHaat are on a mission of building the world’s largest agritech platform,” he said, while outlining its long-term goal.

With an aim to drive efficiency and transparency in this USD 350 billion industry, DeHaat said it has been building a digitised network of farmers as well as last-mile service providers. DeHaat has currently built a rural retail network of more than 3,000 microentrepreneurs for last-mile delivery as well as aggregation. Earlier this year, DeHaat acquired Farm Guide — a SaaS-based platform to provide satellite-based insights and advisory to farmers.

Yana Kachurina, Principal at Sofina said, “Through our due diligence, we became convinced that DeHaat is bringing substantial value-add to the farming community in India.” Vaidhehi Ravindran, Partner, Lightrock India said, “Through innovative social engineering and tech-led execution, DeHaat has built the largest first mile network for farmers and is well positioned to help transform agriculture by improving yields and farmer income.” DeHaat has raised fresh funding within nine months of the last round.

It has completed two strategic acquisitions so far for inorganic growth. Institutional investors Omnivore Partners and Pi Capital (family fund of Narrottam Shekhsaria Group) who invested in the first institutional round in 2019 have exited partially in the current round.


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1 Comment

  1. Pingback: Enterprise software startup OSlash raises USD 2.5 mn in seed funding round

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