Agri-tech platform DeHaat has raised $115 million (about ₹861 crore) in Series D funding, 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, the company said in a statement.

Dexter Capital and Vertices Partners were advisors of this funding round. 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.

“We at DeHaat are on a mission to build the world’s largest agri-tech platform. We have raised $157 million from marquee investors in the last 30 months and our team has grown to a brigade of over 850 professionals with deep expertise of growth, strategy, supply chain, technology and agricultural science. The last seven months have been phenomenal, with five times growth for DeHaat. Hence, we are now well poised to replicate the success in all major agriculture clusters of India in the next 12-15 months,” said Shashank Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO, DeHaat.

Based in Gurgaon and Patna, and founded in 2012 by IIT, IIM and NIT alumni Amrendra Singh, Shyam Sundar, Adarsh Srivastav and Shashank Kumar, DeHaat is a technology-based business-to-farmers (B2F) platform that offers full-stack agricultural services to farmers, including distribution of high-quality agricultural inputs, customised farm advisory, access to financial services, and market linkages for selling their produce.

Quick expansion

DeHaat has currently built a rural retail network of over 3,000 DeHaat micro-entrepreneurs for last-mile delivery and aggregation, serving over 650,000 farmers located across Bihar, UP, Jharkhand and Odisha. DeHaat has now started expanding to new geographies like MP and Rajasthan.

Early this year, DeHaat acquired Farm Guide — a SaaS based platform, offering satellite-based insights and advisory to farmers. The current tech team has grown to 120 members, building unique artificial intelligence and machine learning-based solutions related to crop advisory, last mile supply chain traceability and a B2B SaaS agritech platform for input sellers as well as output buyers.

“The uniqueness of its full-stack approach combined with the “phygital” go-to-market strategy further reaffirmed our view that the company is on track to become a significant player in the Indian farming industry,” said Yana Kachurina, Principal, Sofina.

“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,” said Vaidhehi Ravindran, Partner at Lightrock India.

DeHaat with its unique full-stack approach has been connecting all types of agri businesses (input sellers, output buyers, cattle feed manufacturers, financial institutions, warehousing companies) to the farming community. There are more than 850 unique agribusiness entities currently active on the platform.

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