AgNext raises US $ 21 million in the largest Series A financing in Agri-Tech

AgNext Technologies, India's leading deep-tech agritech startup, announced that it has raised a total of US $ 21 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI) fund, backed by DisruptAD and managed by Falcon Edge. Existing investors Omnivore and Kalaari Capital also participated in the Series A round.

This investment marks the largest Series A funding received by an Indian agritech startup to date. AgNext is also AWI's first investment in India's booming agritech sector. In this round, AgNext has also delivered a 5X exit to a-IDEA NAARM, India's first agribusiness incubator, managed by the National Academy of Agricultural Research Management (NAARM).

Current quality analysis processes are manual, making them costly and time-consuming with lower accuracy (up to ~60%). The lack of quality assessment solutions leads to approximately US $ 90 billion in losses globally in agricultural trade. This results in lower profit margins for farmers and higher pricing for consumers.

AgNext solves the quality analysis problem through its proprietary, in-house technology products. Through a mix of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced data analysis, AgNext provides rapid food quality assessment through its full-stack 'Qualix' platform. By delivering a real-time accuracy of up to 99%, AgNext helps bring trust, speed, and transparency to the agriculture value chain.

AgNext is the only player with a physical and chemical analysis solution applicable across a wide basket of commodities, including grains, spices, tea, milk, and animal feed. The company has collected over 2 million food samples across multiple categories over the last four years, creating a unique and massive AI dataset. AgNext initiated the commercialization of its products earlier this year. With a 100% pilot to paid customer conversion, the company boasts top-tier clients such as ITC, Godrej, and NAFED.

With this new capital infusion, AgNext will enter newer commodities, strengthen its pan-India presence and expand to international markets such as the Middle East, Europe, and South Asia. The funds will also be used to develop its tech platform Qualix, to enable quality-driven trade transactions across the food value chains. Additionally, the company will establish a new office in Abu Dhabi for deeper penetration into the targeted markets by diversifying its commodities portfolio and accelerating innovation to make food trade better, fairer, and more secure in the new geographies.

Taranjeet Singh Bhamra, founder and chief executive officer of AgNext, said, "In the era of agriculture 4.0, the demand for better market linkages and secure food trade is driving deeper penetration of technology in agricultural ecosystems. As first movers in the agricultural deep-tech space, we have established market leadership in India through our novel AI-based technologies that assure quality-based food trade across value chains. The deep-tech-enabled value created by AgNext for our partners has been instrumental in driving our growth story. Today, we are ready to scale our operations globally and delighted to partner with Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI) to accelerate our R&D initiatives and build a robust international presence. Continued support from Omnivore and Kalaari Capital is further validation of our pioneering technologies, and also asserts their sustained commitment to our vision and growth."

Anirudh Singh, managing director at Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI) fund, commented, "With its unique deep-tech solutions, AgNext is poised to transform the agri value chain at a global scale. We were very impressed by the depth of technological innovation shown by the company in building its AI platform. Further, the quality of clients and traction shown by the company on its commercialization journey is a strong validation of the company's technology product suite. We believe AgNext will be a global leader in the agri-tech space and look forward to working with them."

Subhadeep Sanyal, partner at Omnivore, commented, "Since inception, AgNext has done ground-breaking work in collecting millions of unique data sets for multiple commodities. By focusing initial years on refining their deep-tech solutions, they have successfully built unique AI-based technologies and delivered exponential value to all stakeholders. We continue to back AgNext in their mission to change the paradigm of rapid quality estimation of commodities and enabling quality-based trade across geographies."

Mandar Dandekar, principal at Kalaari Capital, said, "AgNext has built uniquely integrated hardware and SaaS offerings that have transformed procurement operations throughout the value chain. Using deep tech to build solutions to solve persisting legacy issues in food quality and trade is a monumental task and requires first principles thinking. The passion, perseverance and tenacity shown by Taranjeet, Sparsh, Subrat and the rest of the team has been very impressive. We look forward to working closely with AgNext in the growth phase of their journey."

Set up in 2016, AgNext Technologies is a leading agritech startup that provides deep-tech enabled solutions for food quality assessment, monitoring, and management. The company has innovated full-stack solutions based on a unique integration of adaptive hardware, integrated software, and data analytics to solve quality-related issues in the post-harvest agriculture value chain. By developing the world's first technologies for standardizing food quality using AI, AgNext brings trust, speed, and transparency to the agriculture value chain.