Agstack Technologies, based out of Indore runs a startup Gramaphone that works in making farming processes more efficient, has raised $1 million (Rs 6.4 crore) in pre-series A funding from Info Edge.
The information has emerged from the filings with the stock exchange by Info Edge, in which it has claimed that this investment gives it a 25% stake in Agstack Technologies and it is synergistic with its intentions to diversify its presence and add variety in its portfolio with the overall internet services industry.
Gramaphone had received seed-funding prior to this from angel investors including Ravi Garikipati, Chief Technology Officer of Flipkart; Ajith Pai, Director at Green Earth; Sanjay Ramkrishnan, former Senior Director and Head Product Marketing at Flipkart and Nitin Agarwal, VP, Wave Crest Group and a few more.
Gramaphone’s co-founder Harshit Gupta explains that they are using technology to help the farming community carry on their choice of crops, fertilizer and pesticides and so on. For this, “they are working on an integrated system for personalised crop advisory, which includes image recognition for pest and disease diagnosis and nutrition management for better yield”.
Gramaphone is opening a technology centre in Bangalore and they have set a target to themselves of catering to over 1 million farmers in the next 6 to 12 months. The freshly infused funds from Info Edge will be utilized towards this end. It is being reported that farmers have benefitted from the technology support being offered by Gramaphone and their productivity levels have increased by 20% to 30%.
Besides the technological assistance to the farmers, the startup also runs an ecommerce site, where, products like seeds, crop protection, nutrition, implements and even agri hardware can be purchased.
Agri-tech appears to be one of the few sectors that have attracted the attention of both the entrepreneurs and the investors and a host of them have come up and are receiving some decent funding as well.
How much of these can actually help Indian agriculture recapture its glory and come out of the mess it finds itself now, can only be known after a certain time period.