Vegrow, India’s leading business to business (B2B) marketplace for fruits announced Monday it has secured funding of a $25 million Series B round led by Prosus Ventures.
Marquee investors Matrix Partners India, Elevation Capital, Lightspeed and Ankur Capital participated in the round while prominent angel and agri veteran Sanjiv Rangrass continues to back the company, Vegrow said in a statement.
The funds will primarily be used for expansion into more demand centres, establishing dominance across supply micro-pockets and nurturing a world-class talent pool in the product, engineering and other support function domains, Vegrow said in a statement.
“Being a table-top consumption product, fruits are consumed raw, and consumers are highly sensitive to the quality. Vegrow adds value at the source and supply chain to ensure and preserve the quality consistently. We are very excited to have Prosus Ventures lead this round and all our internals double down their partnership. We aim to grow sustainably and deliver a $5 billion. outcome within the next 5 years.”, said Shobhit Jain, Co-Founder of Vegrow.
Vegrow was founded in 2020 by IIT alumni Praneeth Kumar, Mrudhukar Batchu, Kiran Naik and Shobhit Jain, who have deep agri expertise and hyper-growth marketplace exposure owing to their past experiences at ITC, Urban Company & Chronus.
This combination of deep agri value chain knowledge, product and tech thinking, and the passion for a very large-scale impact makes for a powerful driving force in the sector. Through their deep data-tech stack the company focuses on matchmaking across demand and supply and value chain innovation.
“At Vegrow, we are focused on value creation for both farmers and customers. On the farmers’ side, we ensure a better realisation through right matchmaking, fair and transparent business practices, and value chain innovations,” said Praneeth Kumar, Co-Founder of Vegrow.
Vegrow focuses on matchmaking across demand and supply for fruits, aggregating multiple channels (wholesalers/semi-wholesalers, modern trade and general trade) in 100 cities on the demand side and 20,000+ farmers on the supply side.
Through its unique community advisory approach, the firm digitally engages with farmers across 400+ production pockets and helps them align with market expectations and get better yield, thereby higher income.
The firm processes more than 200 tons of fruits daily. It has grown 15 times in the last 12 months with industry-leading gross margins of about 20 percent. The growth has been unlocked on the back of its deep tech and data stack across the value chain. It has built capabilities to harness farmer chatter, estimate farmland produce and measure demand across Tier-I, Tier-II and Tier-III markets.
“Building systems and capabilities which can scale is the core tech vision at Vegrow. Today, we have a dynamic understanding of customer quality expectations across 100+ markets and a real-time view of $500 million worth of produce across farmlands,
“Our tech helps in matchmaking by the codification of customer quality, building future farm inventory, deskill supply chain and crowdsourcing market intelligence (price, quality and volume). Our system predicts real-time demand and pricing across markets for 15+ fruits. Our Fresh OS Velynk ties all of this together to ensure an agile and reliable supply chain,” said Mrudhukar Batchu, Co-Founder of Vegrow.
According to the statement, India’s fruit market is valued at $60 billion where every fruit is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity. Within this, Vegrow is already the leader in ‘Pomegranate’ and amongst the top five in several other fruit categories within a short span of two years.
“We have been tracking the agritech space closely through our existing investments in fresh produce and animal protein segments. The fruits industry being historically unorganised, fragmented and inefficient, is poised for similar tech-led disruption. Vegrow has catapulted to pole position by serving pan-India demand through its focus on scale and technology. We are excited to back them as they chase the next level of growth in the country,” said Ashutosh Sharma, Head of Investments, India at Prosus Ventures.
Prosus is a global consumer internet group and one of the largest technology investors in the world. Operating and investing globally in markets with long-term growth potential, Prosus builds leading consumer internet companies that empower people and enrich communities.
The group is focused on building meaningful businesses in the online classifieds, food delivery, payments and fintech, and education technology sectors in markets including India, Russia, and Brazil. Through its ventures team, Prosus invests in areas including health, logistics, blockchain, and social commerce. Prosus actively seeks new opportunities to partner with exceptional entrepreneurs who are using technology to improve people’s everyday lives.
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