Agtech firm Vegrow raises $25 million from Prosus Ventures, others

Agritech platform Vegrow, which connects fruit growers with the markets has raised $25 million Series B funding led by Prosus Ventures. Other investors such as Matrix Partners India, Elevation Capital, Lightspeed India and Ankur Capital also participated in the latest round of funding. Angel investor and agri-veteran Sanjiv Rangrass continues to back the company.

Vegrow connects fruit growers with the trade, aggregating multiple channels (wholesalers/semi-wholesalers, modern trade and general trade) in about 100 cities on the demand side and over 20,000 farmers on the supply side.

Through its unique community advisory approach, Vegrow digitally engages with farmers across 400 production pockets and helps them align with market expectations and get better yield, thereby higher income.

“We handle about 200 tonnes of fruits daily,” said Shobhit Jain, co-founder, Vegrow.

“Being a table-top consumption product, fruits are consumed raw, and consumers are highly sensitive to the quality. Vegrow adds value at source and supply chain to ensure and preserve the quality consistently. We are very excited to have Prosus Ventures lead this round and all our internals double down their partnership,” Jain added.

Vegrow has seen a 15-fold growth in the last 12 months with gross margins of around 20 per cent. The growth has been unlocked on the back of Vegrow’s deep tech and data stack across the value chain.

Ashutosh Sharma, Head of Investments, India at Prosus Ventures said: “We have been tracking the agritech space closely through our existing investments in fresh produce and animal protein segments. The fruits category being historically unorganised, fragmented and inefficient, is poised for similar tech-led disruption. Vegrow has catapulted to pole position by serving pan-India demand through its focus on scale and technology. We are excited to back them as they chase the next level of growth in the country.”

Vegrow has built capabilities to harness farmer chatter, estimate farmland produce and measure demand across Tier-1,2 and 3 markets.

India’s fruit market is valued at $60 billion where every fruit is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity. Within this, Vegrow is already the leader in ‘Pomegranate’ and amongst the top five in several other fruit categories within a short span of two years, Jain claimed.

Vegrow will use the funds for expansion into more demand centres, establishing dominance across supply micro-pockets and nurturing a world-class talent pool in product, engineering and other support function domains.

Mrudhukar Batchu, co-founder, Vegrow, said: “Today, we have a dynamic understanding of customer quality expectations across over 100 markets and a real time view into $500 million worth of produce across farmlands. Our tech helps in matchmaking by codification of customer quality, building future farm inventory, deskill supply chain and crowd sourcing market intelligence (price, quality and volume). Our system predicts real time demand and pricing across markets for over 15 fruits.”