[Funding alert] Agritech startup Gramophone raises $10 M round led by Z3Partners

Gramophone – a full-stack agri-tech platform – on Tuesday announced that it has raised a $10 million round led by Z3Partners, an early growth investor.

Existing investor, Info Edge, has doubled down in this round along with participation from other existing investors, Asha Impact, and Siana Capital. Other new investors in the round include Amit Sharma from erstwhile Sunrise Group, Sumeet Kanwar from Verity, and Chona Family Office (Havmor Group). These family offices bring vast experience in building agri and food businesses.

According to the press statement, Gramophone will use the proceeds towards geographic expansion, marketing, technology development and M&A.

Tauseef Khan, Co-founder and CEO, Gramophone said,

“Our mission is to improve the profitability of farming ecosystem across India. We are building a new age Agriculture Company keeping farmers at the centre. We have seen a huge shift in adoption of technology solutions by the new age farmers."

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"With this investment, we will double down on investing in technologies that lower costs, improves transparency and empowers the local community of agri entrepreneurs with more earning opportunities in rural areas. We are excited to welcome Z3Partners and other new investors in this journey and deepen our partnership with Info Edge, Asha Impact and Siana Capital," he said.

Founded by IIT and IIM alumnus Tauseef, Nishant Vats Mahatre, and Harshit Gupta, Gramophone started as agronomy led, agri-input commerce company from MP. In the last two years, it has become a full-stack technology platform by adding premium farm management solutions, and Gram Vyapaar - an output marketplace.

Today over one million farmers are benefitting from Gramophone’s products and services owing to which the company has seen a 4x increase in revenues over last year and expects to grow aggressively, claims the startup.

Z3Partners has backed other startups such as DealShare, Cyfirma, and made prior fund investments like Ofbusiness, BigBasket, Pepperfry and MedGenome, etc.

“We at Z3PARTNERS are very excited to partner with Gramophone on this journey of bringing ecommerce to Rural India. Tauseef, Nishant, and Harshit’s understanding of Agri-Sciences and eCommerce and their relationships with Farmers as their end customers has been instrumental in their growth and success so far." Gautam Patel, Managing Partner, Z3Partners.

Kitty Agarwal, Partner at Info Edge Ventures, added, “We have now been partners with the Gramophone team for nearly four years and have seen tremendous growth in their evolution from being an advisory led input commerce company to a full-stack Intelligent Farming platform that does end-to-end input to output linkage for farmers and retailers."