Agri Tech Startup KrishiHub Raises Seed Funding from IIT Kanpur INVENT Accelerator and Villgro Innovation Fund – BW Disrupt
KrishiHub has raised undisclosed seed funding from IIT Kanpur INVENT accelerator and Villgro Innovation Fund. INVENT and Villgro are leading this round whereas few angel investors and HNIs are also participating in this round.
KrishiHub is building an agricultural ecosystem with the implication of technology, design, and data science for Indian farmers. The vision of the company is to empower farmers across the country by improving their socio-economic status and providing agri-inputs for better farming productivity. Through a demand-driven platform, KrishiHub delivers fresh vegetables to businesses like restaurants/hotels/canteens/hostels/government institutes/cafeterias etc. directly from farmers, who are spread across different districts in Uttar Pradesh. KrishiHub’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered supply chain enables farm-to-doorstep delivery in less than 12 hours along with up to 25% reduction in vegetable wastage compared to the traditional system. This also allows deploying proprietary algorithms for determining delivery routes for each delivery agent for logistics cost optimization and ensuring on-time delivery.
Currently, in the 11th month of the operations, KrishiHub procures vegetables from 200+ farmers across many districts in Uttar Pradesh (Hapur, Agra, Ghaziabad, Noida, Meerut etc.) and adds value through sorting, cleaning, grading and packaging by skilled labors at 2 warehouses in NCR. The company has completed more than 7500 transactions so far on the platform and delivered over 1500 tonnes of vegetables to 70+ businesses in Ghaziabad, Noida and Greater Noida.
The company was founded in 2016 by Bhoopendra Kumar and Jyotiska Khasnabish. Bhoopendra, CEO, is an alumnus of IIT Guwahati and has more than 6 years of industry experience across MNCs and startups such as Taxi For Sure, HP Enterprise, DataWeave etc. Jyotiska, CTO, is an alumnus of IIIT Bangalore and has more than 4 years of experience in research and product development across MNCs, startups and research institutes like GSN Games, DataWeave, Univ of Illinois etc.
KrishiHub with a team of more than 20 people (5 members strong tech team in Bangalore and 15+ members in operations in NCR) has been able to make its huge impact within a short span of time. It has built a mobile app for farmers that includes price and weather forecasting using machine learning, precision agriculture through satellite imagery, marketplaces for seeds, fertilizers and farm equipment and a discussion forum for farmers that support conversations in regional language.
With this round of funding, KrishiHub plans to expand its operations aggressively across Delhi-NCR, add more businesses to its customer portfolio and increase its farmer base in more states. Bhoopendra says, “Our major target is to build the entire agricultural ecosystem with the inclusion of information and decision support systems for farmers on all agricultural needs. In the coming months, we are going to put more efforts on R&D to improve our technology platform. Soon we are planning to explore possibilities to start operations in Tier-2 cities and collaborate with state governments for better outreach and export Indian agri products to the rest of the world”.