Kerala-based agritech startup Greenikk on Monday said it has secured Rs 5.4 crore ($612,841) as a part of its pre-seed funding led by venture fund 9 Unicorn Ventures.
The round also saw participation from Smart Spark Ventures, Manish Modi, (Mastermind Capital Ventures), Saurabh Agarwal and Mayank Tiwari, (Reshamandi) and Arjun Pillai (Zoom info), among others.
The funding exercise comprised Rs 3.34 crore and Rs 1.7 crore in equity and debt respectively.
Founded by Fariq Naushad and Previn Jacob in 2020, Greenikk connects banana cultivators, wholesalers, exporters and business-to-business buyers on a single platform. The company aims to hit Rs 100 crore in annual recurring revenue and further plans to rack up Rs 50 crore by the end of this year.
“We will be using the funds mainly to establish model enablement centres, gain traction and build up a scalable business model as also for hiring,” said Naushad and Jacob in a joint statement.
9Unicorns, set up by incubator and accelerator Venture Catalysts, announced the fifth closure of its in May last year. The fund was launched in late 2020 with a total size of $50 million.
As per Avendus Capital's report, India’s agritech space is expected to grow in scale and have 8-10 startups with more than a billion dollars in value each over the next five years.
The agritech sector is anticipated to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 50% over the next five years, reaching $34 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) by 2027, a sharp rise from the current $4 billion, it added.
The segment saw sharp growth during the pandemic with almost $2 billion of capital being raised in the last two years (63% of total capital invested). In 2022, almost 1.2 billion was invested in the sector. In December, DeHaat raised $60 million in a Series E funding round co-led by existing investors Singapore’s Temasek Holdings and Belgium’s Sofina Ventures.
