Agrigenomics startup, Piatrika Biosystems, on Thursday said it has secured seed funding of $1.2 million (around Rs 9.36 crore) led by Ankur Capital.
The company plans to use the fresh funds to scale its product development team and commercialization of its minimum viable product (MVP).
Founded in 2019 by Vasudev Kumanduri and Phani Yarlagadda, Piatrika claims to be building a new innovative cloud-based enterprise platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for agrigenomic discoveries and plant breeding decision support, program designing and monitoring.
“Weather, war, and viruses have disrupted global food systems. This has put immense pressure to produce more food using less resources. Seed companies and agri-research institutes are looking for affordable Enterprise grade plug-in solutions that can leverage the recent advancements in technology to optimize the processes involved in taking a seed from lab to farmer,” said Phani Yarlagadda, co-founder and chief operating officer at Piatrika Biosystems.
“With the challenges that agriculture faces both from climate and increased food demand, innovation in the seed sector is critical. With advances in computational biology, we see this as a critical tool to bring new seeds to market quickly,” said Ritu Verma, partner, Ankur Capital.
Ankur Capital was set up in 2014 by Rema Subramanian and Ritu Verma. Its first fund had invested in 14 companies including Cropin, Niramai, Healthsutra, ERC and StringBio.
Several startups in the larger agritech segment have managed to pull in funding from strategic players and investors.
In April, Agrizy Ventures Pvt Ltd, which runs agritech platform Agrizy, secured seed funding of $4 million led by Ankur Capital.
In March, agri-tech startup Otipy raised Series B funding of Rs 235 crore (approximately $32 million) led by homegrown private equity fund WestBridge Capital.
In February, VCCircle reported that silk business-to-business startup is in talks with investors to raise funding at $600-700 million valuation.
In January this year, JM Financial Private Equity’s second fund has led a Rs 100 crore investment in agritech platform BigHaat Agro Pvt Ltd, as a part of its Series B funding round.
