SaaS-led food supply platform FarMart on Wednesday announced a $32 million Series B fundraise round led by General Catalyst, with participation from existing investors, Matrix Partners India and Omidyar Network India.
The Gurugram-headquartered firm said it would use these funds to fuel the growth of its digital distribution network across India and to export markets, as well as R & D investments. This comes a few months after FarMart’s $10 million Series A in October 2021 and brings the total capital raised by the company to $48M. FarMart says it has enrolled over 60,000 retailers and 2 million farmers in 600 districts.
FarMart’s B2B product is essentially a digitization of agricultural supplies and produce, putting buyers and sellers located near each other in touch, which it says eliminates several costs involved in transporting goods across the country; it says businesses buying produce benefit from lower spillage, a big problem with longer haul produce transport. The company’s retailer footprint is currently heavy in central and northern Indian states, with relatively sparser presence in the south and Jammu & Kashmir.
It has also dabbled with lending, providing loans for smallholding farmers with land less than 2 hectares. Its business partners include corporates like Brittania and ITC.
The fiscal affected by COVID 19 destruction was difficult for the agritech startup during which its operational scale contracted and its revenues dropped by 24.6% to around 99 lakhs. During the same period, FarMart expenses grew by 11.7%YoY to Rs 3.83 crore in FY21. Due to restricted scale of operations and doubtful collections from shop owners, FarMart’s annual losses swelled up by 20.3% YoY to Rs 2.25 crore during FY21.
The company had raised Rs 51.81 lakhs in the last tranche of its Series A round from Panacea Investments at a post money valuation of Rs 247 crore in the second week of February.The three co-founders Alekh Sanghera, Mehtab Hans and Lokesh Singh have already diluted their collective holding to 26.5% before allotment of shares to General Catalyst and other Series B investors.
