[Funding alert] Agritech startup Fasal raises $4M led by 3one4 Capital
Fasal will use this funding to expand its business across India and Southeast Asia besides investments into technology and hiring.
Agritech startup
has raised $4 million in a Pre-Series A round of funding led by 3one4 Capital with participation from existing investors Omnivore and Wavemaker Partners.The other investors who participated in this round include Genting Ventures (Malaysia), The Yield Lab Asia-Pacific, Antares Investments, and Sandeep Singhal of Nexus.
Fasal will use this funding to expand its business across India and Southeast Asia, strengthen its full-stack services, and ramp up hiring for sales and marketing, agronomy, and technology teams.
In a joint statement, Fasal founders Ananda Verma and Shailendra Tiwari said, “As government policies are evolving to support more robust and open supply chains, there has never been a bigger incentive for horticulture farmers to grow more and grow better. Fasal's full-stack offering will fuel a rapid transition of Indian horticulture farming from gut-based legacy operations into knowledge-led profitable businesses.”
Founded in 2018, Fasal provides an AI-powered IoT SaaS platform that uses on-farm sensors and scientific algorithms to deliver farm and crop-specific actionable insights to farmers in vernacular languages.
On the investment into Fasal, Anurag Ramdasan, Partner at 3one4 said, "Technology interventions are key to overcoming the plateau in agricultural productivity. Fasal’s precision agriculture solution is perfectly packaged for the needs of horticulture farmers, where advisory is both necessary and welcome.”
The platform is also working on a range of new services including fruit and vegetables market linkages and parametric crop insurance. The startup claims that it has helped save more than nine billion litres of water from irrigation, reduced pesticide expenditure by over 60 percent, and increased yields across 40,000 plus acres of farmland.
Mark Kahn, Managing Partner of Omnivore, commented, “Fasal has proven the fact that farmers are eager to adopt precision agriculture technologies. In the years to come, we foresee Fasal playing an important role in driving sustainable agriculture and becoming a valued brand in the global horticulture space."
Edited by Saheli Sen Gupta