Agritech focussed Omnivore Partners raises $97 Mn worth second fund

The VC industry has been seeing a spike in the fundraising abilities as well as market growth in the past couple of years. A lot of entrepreneurs have been joining VCs and numerous partners in existing VCs have been starting their own funds.

Numerous VCs like 021 Ventures, Sachin Bansal's new fund among many others have been able to pick up impressive funds, sometimes even more than their aspired corpus.

One such VC is Omnivore Partners which has just announced its second fund. The firm that invests in early-stage startups has picked up an impressive $97 million worth second fund, a close higher than the expected $75 million corpus.

This goes on to showcase the spike in the market growth of Indian VC not just nationally, but internationally as well.

United Kingdom’s CDC Group, Emerging Markets a Switzerland based investment fund, FMO a Dutch Development Bank, BASF Ventures a Belgian Investment Company for Developing Countries, Japan-based Mistletoe, and other family offices joined the fund as Limited Partners.

The investment in Omnivore, moreover, is special because it not only showcases global interest in the Indian market, but it also reflects the rise in the agritech fundings and developing a market interest in this emerging segment.

Omnivore targets early staged impact startups focusing on agritech in a way to transform this primary industry with technology. From the new $97 million fund, the company has already closed investments in 5 firms with ticket sizes ranging between $900k to $4 million.

These 5 startups include Doodhwala, TartanSense, and Intello Labs.

It plans on adding more startups to its portfolio that plan on bringing disrupt the food systems and brings stability, profitability, and sustainability to agriculture, Mark Kahn, Managing Partner at the VC told ET.

This is becoming a trend in the larger Indian industry where successful entrepreneurs like Sachin Bansal, after exiting from Flipkart are building a business to acquire agritech startups like CIFCPL.

And it makes sense, after a lot of revolution that tech has brought in commerce, food, hyperlocal, financial services, agritech was the next big area to crack upon. A big chunk of the country’s population still relies on agriculture to save its day, but that is one sector that remains neglected in exponential growth plans. 

As per the report, one-fifth of Indian GDP comes from agriculture and India has the second largest arable land in the world. Solving the problems faced by 200 million farmers becomes a big necessity and hence a greater opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Going further, it would be interesting to see how this funding trend henceforth evolves and what startups get to benefit from it.