INDONESIA, 4 March 2022: Jakarta's AgriAku, a B2B marketplace for farmers, announced that it has raised USD 6m in pre-Series A funding. Go Ventures led the round, which also saw participation from MDI Arise, MDI Centauri, Mercy Corps Social Venture Fund, and angel investors.
AgriAku will use the funding to hire new employees and expand its market penetration. The marketplace allows retailers to buy agricultural supplies, like seeds, fertilizers, and agrochemicals, from wholesalers and manufacturers. The retailers then sell these supplies to farmers.
AgriAku's objective is to provide retailers and farmers with a broader selection of products and transparent pricing. It also provides suppliers with business software, like inventory management and bookkeeping tools, that can help them forecast what the farmers will need.
AgriAku's marketplace launched in May 2021, and the company reports that gross merchandise value has grown at an average of 200 per cent month over month over the past four months. The number of registered farmer stores on AgriAku has grown to about 10,000.
Last year, Irvan Kolonas, founder of social enterprise agritech startup Vasham, and Danny Handoko, formerly CEO of Indonesian hospitality startup Airy, founded the company. The team also includes Rezky Haryanto Agustia, former assistant vice president for supply chain and operations at e-commerce giant Bukalapak.
According to TechCrunch report, Kolonas explains that AgriAku is a “culmination of a lifelong mission for me, as I first took on the mission 10 years ago with the start of my first company Vasham, a social enterprise, doing a full close-loop, full-stack model helping smallholder corn farmers.”
After spending years trying different models, including direct-to-farmer and retail stores, Kolonas said he realized it was not sustainable to sell directly to farmers. “Instead, we believe firmly now that the most important stakeholder is the Toko Tanis. The Toko Tanis are our mitras or agents who distribute not only inputs but eventually other services to farmers. We want to leverage the decades of relationship that have been built up by them as community leaders with the farmers in their surrounding areas,” the report added.
AgriAku is the latest among several agritech startups in Indonesia that have recently announced funding rounds. Other B2B marketplaces include TaniHub Group, which focuses on connecting farmers with customers to sell their produce. Kolonas said AgriAku eventually also wants to enable farmers to sell produce, by connecting them to off-takers, or factories like rice millers or corn dryers.
In a prepared statement, Go-Ventures partner Aditya Kamath said, “Indonesia’s agricultural industry contributes significantly to the economy, at approximately 13.5 per cent of GDP. However, the upstream agricultural market is highly fragmented with a disorganized value chain for agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizers and agrochemicals.” He added, “AgriAku’s B2B input marketplace platform is ideally positioned to improve price transparency and market access for all stakeholders in the agricultural inputs sector.”
Image credit: industrywired.com
