Banana ecosystem start-up gets ₹5.04 crore in pre-seed funding

Banana ecosystem start-up gets ₹5.04 crore in pre-seed funding

Greenikk, an agritech company based in Kerala, India, launched the first full-stack supply chain in the country. This chain connects banana growers, wholesalers, exporters, and B2B buyers on a single platform. It has now raised ₹5.04 crore in pre-seed funding from a number of institutional funders, angel investors, and serial entrepreneurs from India and other countries.

Greenikk started in January 2020 and has built enablement centres in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, where bananas are grown in large quantities. It helps banana farmers in many ways, like by giving them money, seeds, crop advice, crop insurance, agri-inputs, and connections to markets. This covers the whole process of making bananas and selling them inside and outside of the country.

Fariq Naushad and Previn Jacob, co-founders of the start-up that was incubated at Indigram Labs in Delhi, said that ₹3.34 crore will be in equity and the rest will be in debt.

9 Unicorn Ventures

Lead investor 9 Unicorn Ventures, Kerala-based angel group Smart Spark Ventures, Manish Modi, who runs Mauritius-based Mastermind Capital Ventures and has invested in several agritech start-ups and sits on the investment committee of Venture Catalysts, Saurabh Agarwal and Mayank Tiwari, who started Reshamandi and have raised $40 million so far, and Arjun Pillai, who is on the board of Nasdaq-listed Zoom Info,

The Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (Birac) had already given a grant to the start-up. Other investors include 1.0 Ventures, a US-based angel group with a mix of founders and professionals who invest in early-stage technology start-ups; Amit Antony Alex, the former Country Director of Upaya Social Ventures; serial entrepreneur Shiv Shankar; and Aman Tekriwal, who has made a lot of investments in startups through Maxar VC.

Next fundraising plan

Other investors include the IIM-Ahmedabad accelerator Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, Suresh Aravind, the former Worldwide Vice-President of Johnson & Johnson, and Sriram Seshadri, a serial entrepreneur from the US. The co-founders of Greenikk said that most of the money will be used to set up model enablement centres, gain traction, build a business model that can be scaled up, and hire people.

‘We want our annual recurring revenue (ARR) to reach ₹100 crore by FY23. The next round of funding will try to get ₹50 crore from the best venture capital funds in the country. Some of these funds have already said they will invest,’ they said.