Agricultural startup Gramophone has raised $1 million in pre-Series A funding from Info Edge.
This is the first institutional funding in the startup which helps farmers to achieve better yield through information, inputs and technology.
The Indore-based platform has earlier received angel funding from Ravi Garikipati, Chief Technology Officer at Flipkart; Ajith Pai of GreenEarth and others.
Gramophone will invest the raised funds into technology development, team building and customer acquisitions. It also plans to open a tech centre in Bengaluru, which will bring the agritech startup closer to the technology ecosystem.
“We needed the new investment to accelerate the expansion process. Currently, we have around 60,000 farmers on our platform. We are aiming to increase the number to close to a million in the next 12 months,” said Tauseef Khan, Co-founder at Gramophone.
He added that technology is the next big target of the company. The platform will recruit more tech workforce.
The startup uses soil mapping, geo-tagging and imaging solutions to provide right kind of information and solution to farmers.
Launched in 2016, Gramophone works with farmers and provides them agronomy services and right inputs during the entire cropping cycle, at their doorstep.
It provides the services to farmers through a toll-free number. The farmers can give a missed call to the company’s number and they receive a call-back from the company’s experts, who offer them advice and provide suitable solutions.
In the past few years, the agritech startup ecosystem has grown manifold where many such startups are offering different services to farmers.
Last year, Bengaluru-based agritech startup KrishiHub raised seed funding led by IIT Kanpur INVENT accelerator and Villgro Innovation Fund. The AI-enabled startup is building an agricultural ecosystem with the implication of technology, design, and data science for Indian farmers.
Besides, venture capital firms are also bullish about agritech startups.
Last month, Venture capital firm Omnivore Partners closed the first phase of second round in which it secured $46 million from a clutch of investors to invest the fresh fund in 15 to 20 agritech and rural innovation-specific startups in the next 5 years. The investors in Omnivore Partners include Sidbi, RBL Bank, Sorenson Impact Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, Dutch Good Growth Fund and others.
