Crofarm records 2.2X revenue growth in FY20; claims 5,000 daily orders with Otipy

Farm to retail agritech startup Crofarm is gradually gaining ground with its pivot from its previous avatar. The Gurugram-based company used to be a farm to retail business, however, it changed track to become B2B2C platform Otipy in early 2020. Otipy is a community-based platform to connect consumers, resellers and farmers for bringing fresh produce to doorstep.

Since its renewed focus, the WhatsApp-integrated social commerce platform claims to cater to over 5,000 daily orders from one lakh registered customers across NCR. The company said that it has a long term plan to tap into 300 million first-time online shoppers across tier II and III cities. The tech-enabled platform recently extended services to Bhiwadi.

While the performance of its new business model will only be ascertained at the end of the ongoing fiscal, Crofarm has managed to grow its sales nearly 2.2X to a little over Rs 24.4 crore FY20 from the sales of around Rs 11.26 crore it made during FY19. 

Moving over Crofarm’s expenses in FY20, the company spent around Rs 30.72 crore in total during, growing by 86.8% from the total expenditure of Rs 16.4 crore in FY19. Around 72.21% of these expenses were incurred in procuring farm produce from the farmers, growing by 2.15X from Rs 10.31 crore in FY19 to Rs 22.15 crore in FY20.

Employee benefit expenses also grew 47.4% from Rs 2.5 crore in FY19 to around Rs 3.7 crore in FY20 while another Rs 4.44 crore was incurred in other operating expenses during the same period. 

Crofarm’s losses grew by 23% to a little over Rs 6.3 crore during the fiscal ended in March 2020, its EBITDA margins improved by 2000 BPS from -44% in FY19 to -24% in FY20 along with 2X growth in the scale of operations. 

Responding to Entrackr’s queries about its B2B2C model, the company said that after seeing success in Delhi-NCR the company plans to extend its services to the next tier cities. “For the rapid expansion, we are in discussion with venture capitals to raise at least $10 million,” said a Crofarm spokesperson. “We already raised $2 million last year from Inflection Point (IP) Ventures and the Smile Group for Otipy.”