Faarms, an agritech startup, has acquired $2 million in a seed fundraising round led by international investors.
According to a press release from the company on Thursday, the round was led by Koh Boon Hwee and Dr. Cornelius ( Conny ) Boersch, among other angel investors.
Faarms has been modelled after Amazon for the farming community, as a one-stop online shop where farmers can access a large inventory of certified products at the stroke of a button and have them delivered to their doorstep with cashless payment options. Even the most basic of requirements, such as seeds, fertilizers, cow feed, and, of course, the resources to buy them and transport the heavy loads back, are in short supply in India’s rural region. Faarms was established as a centralized platform to address all of these issues.
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The founder of Mountain Partners, Dr. Cornelius ( Conny ) Boersch, is a serial entrepreneur and business angel ‘Faarms has the potential to transform the agriculture industry not only in India but throughout Southeast Asia. Platforms that connect producers and buyers directly offer a tremendous opportunity for all value chain stakeholders to benefit. This enterprise has the potential to empower the country’s rural farmers while also becoming financially successful.’
Faarms now has over 8 lakh subscribers, distributes to 20,000 villages in over 200 pin codes, and has impacted the lives of 60% of cattle farmers in 14 villages in Rajasthan’s Kota district, who saw a 16 percent increase in their average income.
e-marketplace for the farming community
‘Faarms was conceived with the goal of creating an e-marketplace for our country’s farming community, with the idea of assisting a kisaan in purchasing inputs from some of the world’s best-known brands and obtaining crop-related advice at the click of a button, sitting at home. We want to bring financial inclusion and digital literacy to rural India by assisting farmers in adopting digital payments with the help of on-the-ground staff,’ says Taranbir Singh, Co-founder & CEO Faarms, who previously led the Rural Banking Division at Yes Bank before joining Faarms.
‘The funds raised will be utilized to expanding our presence in India’s North-Eastern, Central, and Southern states.’
Furthermore, ‘we are looking to add new product segments and services for farmers, as well as deploy advanced technologies for seamless multilingual platform operation, making it easier for farmers to get the required information,’ says Alok Duggal, Chief Operating Officer & Co-founder at Faarms. He went on to say, ‘We are grateful to all of our investors who believed in our work and came forward to support us in building a company that will truly shape our country’s farming ecosystem.’
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‘As active investors in SMEs working at the grassroots level, we are extremely pleased to see how Faarms is able to reach out to a large number of farmers across a large geographic area in a short period of time during the pandemic. We as a startup are confident that Faarms will change the way farmers produce farm products and acquire knowledge,’ said Singapore-based angel investor Koh Boon Hwee.
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