Agritech Startup “Agrix” Raised Growth Capital from Lead Angels Network

Agrix Agrotech has raised growth capital from Lead Angels Network. The capital infusion will be used to support Business Growth and scale existing operations and further strengthen its team and technology platform. Agrix will also use the funds to further enhance farmer engagement and build Brand Awareness.

The agriculture sector employs more than half the workforce in India yet contributes less than 20% to the GDP. AgriTech startups are helping in bringing efficiency across the supply chain, access to quality inputs, financing options, insurance & building structured data. The total addressable market for agritech sector is expected to cross $ 24.1 B by 2025. Agrix takes an integrated approach to engage and empower the small and marginal farmers, who constitute more than 80% of the agricultural workers in India. Staying true to the promise of affordable, responsible, and usable innovations for the farmers, Agrix mission is to involve and empower the farmers across the agri-value chain.

Agrix creates farming clusters to ensure bankable farm mechanization, quality agri-inputs, digital plot mapping and monitoring, and efficient market linkage to small and marginal farmers. Clustering allows small farmers to access best farming practices despite the scale disadvantage. This has enabled a fragmented 1 to 2 acre farmer to deploy combined harvesters, tractors, rotavators and various agri implements at affordable cost, using best quality Agri inputs thereby improving yield, quality, timely harvest and best realizations. The business model has solid unit economics and good profitability.

Agrix is Founded by Nilay Pandey and team, all of whom hail from farming families in Bihar and have wanted to return to the villages to make a difference to the poor state of the fragmented farmer.  Nilay has a PhD from IIT-Delhi, and his co-founders Saurav Singh and Vivek Kumar, are computer engineers. Agrix was seed-funded by the Maple Capital Advisors Accelerator Program along with Abhinav Grover (Director, Maple Accelerator) and Samarth Agrawal (Founder Maxwholesale) in September 2020.

“The investment will enable Agrix to further strengthen its position among the farmers. With this investment we will be able to increase our coverage to more than 20,000 acres of fragmented farms providing farming services (machinery and inputs) and market linkages and adding sophisticated technology with further scale up” said Nilay Pandey - Founder & CEO, Agrix.

“Agri-Tech sector though a slow starter, is expected to churn out couple of unicorns within the next 18 months. Current market provides ample room for enhancing efficiencies across mechanisation of farms, supply chain, market linkages among others. Agrix is clearly operating in some of the white spaces that provide interesting investment opportunities for early stage investing.” said Sushanto Mitra - Founder & CEO, Lead Angels Network.

Abhishek Goel – an Angel Investor, who led the round at Lead Angels, further added – “In Agrix, we liked the founders’ approach of combining shared economy & market aggregation to cater to the underserved farmers.  Looking at their hands-on implementation, we see immense potential in Agrix scaling up rapidly, catering to Bharat, rather than India.”

“The passion of Nilay and team to make a difference to the small farmer profitably enabled by technology which we backed at idea stage has been attested with this round. The opportunity is very large, and we believe this round will enable quick scale up. It’s great to see some high quality angels through Lead Angels back this and enable the scale up journey of Agrix ” said Pankaj Karna - Founder & MD, Maple Capital Advisors said.