AI-powered fresh food aggregator platform Aibono raises $2.5M in Pre-Series A round
The startup will use this funding to scale its Seed-to-Plate Platform for fruits and vegetables, a step ahead of the farm-to-fork model, to a larger network of farmers and cities.
AI-powered fresh food aggregator platform Aibono raised $2.5 million in its Pre-Series A round led by impact investor Menterra (India), Artha Initiatives (Zurich), Milliways Ventures (Bay Area), Rebright Partners (Japan), 3One4 Capital (India). Founded in 2013, Aibono was founded by Vivek Rajkumar, an alumnus of IIT Madras.
The company’s Seed-to-Plate Platform syncs demand with AI-powered precision farming. This connects both ends of the food value chain by delivering not only better yields to the farmer but also fresh, reliable, and traceable farm produce to the retailer, hotelier, and the end consumer.
Targeting the fruits and vegetables market in India, which is valued at $250 billion with potential to double to $500 billion over the next decade, Aibono is well ahead of the curve to disrupt the segment of fresh produce that is highly perishable, using real-time demand sync bridging small farmers and retailers. The company resolves this with technology knowhow having built the platform for over five years and tested with 400+ farmers.
Similar to the milk value chain and dairy co-operatives, Aibono’s farmer centric platform helps small farmers leverage technologies like farm analytics, IoT, and data science for a guaranteed 2x yield and scalable output.
Vivek says, “Aibono further synchronises cropping matrix and predictive harvesting at the farm with retailer consumption data, upgrading the value chain to a data layer extending from seed to plate."
This mitigates the risk of high perishability of fresh farm produce wherein farmers will benefit from better price actualisation and minimise wastage by way of accurate mapping of demand and consumption with quality yields.
In the next phase of its growth, Aibono plans to expand its market reach to more Tier I, Tier II cities, rope in 1,000+ network of standalone retailers, strengthen logistics that minimise the Seed-to-Plate timeline, ramp up its headcount, and on-board the next phase of small food and vegetable farmers.
Also read: IBM bets big on agriculture, to help farmers scale up
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