New harvest: Indian agriculture tech businesses see growth in B2B segment

Tuesday, 15 October 2019 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Today, India is home to over 450 start-ups in the agriculture tech sector. As per a recent Newscom report, this space has seen funding close to $248 million, as compared to the 2018 number of around $73 million – a 300% growth in less than a year.

The agriculture tech sector is growing at a rate of 25% year on year. The growth is mostly driven by the B2B channel with venture capital firms such as Accel Partners, Tiger Global, Kalari Capital, Omnivore, Bertelsmann India Investments and Beenext investing in this sector.

Indian agriculture tech start-ups operate in a number of key areas across the supply chain addressing Market Linkage improving supply chain and taking farmers’ products directly to consumers, Digital Agriculture driving transparency, traceability and real-time access, Better Access to Inputs (seeds, fertilisers, etc.) taking quality inputs to the farmers for better, Farming as a Service making services affordable to small and marginal farmers and financing innovations taking roots in farmer financing.

More than 50% of start-ups operate in these areas. Simultaneously, more than 50% of agriculture tech funding goes to supply chain start-ups, with Ninja cart bagging around $165 million, the highest overall.

Recent developments in modern technologies have helped these businesses scale. Drone technology and IoT sensors have helped in large scale mapping of fields and remote crop monitoring, which can then be linked to a mobile platform. Other technologies such as blockchain, data science and analytics, image sensing and Machine Learning (ML) have helped in addressing supply chain and ERP use cases with innovative business models.

Farmers have been very responsive to these technologies, which has been further aided by mobile penetration and low data rates. In the last decade, farmer income increased by 1.7x, further enabling them to try newer technologies.