Full-stack agritech startup DeHaat on December 1 said it has raised $60 million in a Series E funding round co-led by Sofina Ventures and Temasek. The company also said other existing investors RTP Global Partners, Prosus Ventures, and Lightrock India also participated in the round.
DeHaat had raised Rs 366.6 crore ($45.8 million) led by Sofina Ventures, citing the company’s regulatory filing with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA). This, however, was a part of a larger round, and the company today shared the entire fundraise amount in a statement.
As per the filings from MCA in October, Sofina Ventures led the round with Rs 240 crore while RTP Global Partners, Prosus (Naspers Ventures), and Lightrock India pumped in Rs 48 crore, Rs 32 crore, and Rs 46.6 crore respectively. The filings also highlighted that after the current funding round, the company is valued at 695 million (considering the dollar at Rs 80).
In the official statement today, the company said the funding comes as DeHaat adds over a million farmers to its platform, expands its footprints to newer geographies across the globe, and broadens its service offerings. The company, however, did not disclose if there was a revision in the valuation with additional funding coming in.
Founded in 2012, DeHaat, a Hindi word for village or countryside, has built a full-stack agricultural model which hosts services ranging from distribution of agricultural inputs, customised farm advisory, access to financial services, and market linkages to sell farmers’ produce.
“60x growth of DeHaat in last 40 months has been phenomenal and has laid a foundation for a clear path to profitability. Closing a $60 million round when 70 percent of the last raise is still left signifies a victorious status of DeHaat as a market leader in AgTech,” said Shashank Kumar, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of DeHaat.
“We are very well capitalized at this point in time & we aim to leverage this status to consolidate our growth towards efficiency and profitability. Hence, we aim to break even in the next 12 months along with 2-2.5x growth on a YoY basis,” he added.
This comes months after DeHaat joined the list of new-age technology companies to resort to layoffs, Moneycontrol reported in August. The move to cut costs and fire employees came barely 10 months after the company raised its large funding round of $115 million.
In October 2021, the company raised $115 million in a round that saw participation by investors such as Sofina, Lightrock, Temasek, Sequoia, and Prosus, making it among the largest agritech fundings in India.
During the fundraise, which was the latest, the company was valued at over $500 million, effectively entering the soonicorn or ‘soon-to-be-unicorn’ club. A unicorn is a startup valued at over $1 billion.
The company said, in the statement today, DeHaat is serving more than 1.5 million farmers located across 11 agricultural states including Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Odisha, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh & Haryana.
“We continue to be impressed by DeHaat’s vision and endeavor to empower farmers and local communities, and with this additional funding we hope to create an even deeper and broader impact within the existing network as well as new geographies,” said Yana Kachurina, principal at Sofina.
DeHaat added it has built a last-mile supply chain in more than 1,10,000 villages across over 150 districts of India through its digitised network of more than 10,000 micro-entrepreneurs called ‘DeHaat Centers’ for last-mile delivery as well as aggregation.
The company also said that Dexter Capital and Vertices Partners were the advisors of this funding round.
The company has also made four acquisitions since 2019. In April, the company acquired food tech startup Y-Cook India Pvt Ltd for an undisclosed amount in an all-cash deal.
This came after it acquired agri-input marketplace startup Helicrofter in January to expand its presence in Maharashtra and the rest of western India. In 2021, it acquired FarmGuide, which allowed the integration of satellite-based crop advisory solutions for farmers. In May 2019, the company acquired VezaMart, a platform that builds farm management solutions for farmers.
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