India’s AgroStar raises $70M in Series D funding round

AgroStar has announced today that it 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. The Raine Group was the exclusive advisor for this transaction.

Founded by Sitanshu Sheth and Shardul Sheth, AgroStar is working on a mission of “Helping Farmers Win”. It leverages data and technology to solve farmers’ problems of access to good quality agri-inputs and bridge the knowledge gap owing to traditional farming practices.

AgroStar today is India’s largest digital farmer network and agri inputs platform serving over five million farmers 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.

AgroStar is seeing rapid growth of its platform with its mobile App crossing the 5 million download milestone. 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 AgroStar’s brand pull and the content and information-led approach to serve its farmers with additional touchpoints. AgroStar has ramped up its brand stores from 50 to over 1,000 stores in the last twelve months.

AgroStar is also creating a deep impact by adding substantial value to farmers in terms of reduction in input cost and increase in yield. A report commissioned this year by CDC indicates that 82% of the farmers reported that their quality of life got better due to AgroStar and 73% reported there is no alternative to AgroStar.