India’s Agrim snags $17.3M to help farmers get inputs like seeds and pesticides more easily

Agriculture in India provides livelihood support to over 42% of its population, contributing 18% to the country’s GDP, according to government data. However, the agri-input market, which provides inputs for the sector — be it seeds, pesticides, herbicides, or cultivation and harvesting tools — largely relies on traditional channels, including local offline marketplaces. The sector lacks a robust supply chain, and logistics are complicated in remote geographies where most farmers are located.

Additionally, India’s agri-inputs landscape is different from that of the U.S. and Europe due to its fragmented market structure, diversified demand, and seasonal nature of crops.

Agrim aims to address all these discrepancies by building a just-in-time supply chain to help agri-input retailers buy inputs from a specific manufacturer.

The marketplace helps take the order to the manufacturing warehouse the moment it comes from a retailer, co-founder Mukul Garg said in an exclusive interview.

Garg, a second-time entrepreneur who co-founded the travel app Tripigator in 2013, founded Agrim along with Avi Jain in April 2020. He has also headed products and growth at logistics company BlackBuck and was responsible for building its on-demand trucking marketplace.

Agrim deals with retailers and manufacturers that have not used an e-commerce platform before, offering a minimalistic user interface along with the ability to let retailers set the pricing. The portal also includes a custom-designed order management system that allocates a manufacturer to every order it gets and ensures the pickup and delivery timelines are matched. Further, the startup works with multiple third-party logistics service providers to handle last-mile delivery.

The startup currently offers its catalog in four categories: seeds, agrochemicals, nutrition and tools. Each category also includes subcategories (600 subcategories in total), such as herbicides, fungicides and pesticides for crop protection, and 70 subcategories in the equipment segment, including hand tools and motor-operated tools.

Agrim uses a pricing intelligence model to set appropriate prices for products it gets from manufacturers. There are system algorithms to set prices based on factors including demand and supply to provide dynamic pricing on its platform. The startup takes anywhere between 10% to 60–70% of margins, Garg said, after giving a certain price to the manufacturer.

Agrim also offers lending to retailers, who usually do not get access to credit through traditional channels, and about 10% of its retail base currently uses that credit offering, Garg told TechCrunch. It hopes to grow that business to 30% of retailers in the next few years, in part by extending the credit period from 30 days to up to 45 days.

Now, the four-year-old company has raised $17.3 million in a new funding round led by Asia Impact. It plans to use its fresh funding to expand its catalog of agri-inputs from over 30,000 items to 150,000 in the next three years, and to expand to southern and western parts of India, including Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and some parts of Maharashtra, Garg told TechCrunch.

Similarly, the startup plans to expand its catalog by adding two new categories: animal feed covering cattle, fish and shrimp feed and testing out irrigation equipment.

Agrim also seeks to enter into the market of private-label agri-inputs within the next six months in order to help farmers get inputs at retail prices instead of paying a premium

“We are trying to democratize as a platform,” said Garg. “We are seeing a lot of demand and supply mismatches. So with private labels, we want to solve for unmet demand or supply.”

Agrim claims a base of 1,200 manufacturers and 25,000 retailers serving 15 million farmers. The startup generated over $36 million in the last financial year and is on the annual revenue run rate of nearly $60 million.

The all-equity Series B round also included participation from existing investors Accion Venture Lab, India Quotient, Kalaari, and Omnivore.