B2B fruits marketplace startup Vegrow raises $25M in Series B from Prosus Ventures, others

B2B fruits marketplace startup Vegrow said it raised $25 million in a Series B funding round led by Prosus Ventures, the startup said on Monday.

Investors, including Matrix Partners India, Elevation Capital, Lightspeed India, and Ankur Capital, also participated in the round.

Vegrow said it will use the fresh funds to expand into demand centres and hire across domains, including product, engineering, and other support functions.

Ashutosh Sharma, Head of Investments - India, Prosus Ventures, said, "Vegrow has catapulted to pole position by serving pan-India demand through its focus on scale and technology. We are excited to back it as it chases the next level of growth in the country."

The startup has grown 15X in the last 12 months, with gross margins of around 20 percent. It is present in 100 cities on the demand side and has over 20,000 farmers across more than 400 production pockets.

Founded in 2020 by IIT alumni Praneeth Kumar, Mrudhukar Batchu, Kiran Naik, and Shobhit Jain, Vegrow helps bring demand and supply side traders and buyers of fruits on a singular platform and helps them with trading.

The startup increases the net earnings of partner farmers by leveraging technology across different stages of the farming cycle. It helps in crop planning, gives them access to quality inputs, monitors their adherence to practices, and ultimately, sells their harvest to the right sets of buyers.

"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 over 15 fruits," said Mrudhukar Batchu, Co-founder of Vegrow.