Harvesting Farmer Network, which helps farms with credit risk, has raised $4m in a funding round.
Social Capital, a Silicon Valley-based technology investment firm, supplied the capital, which marks Harvesting Farmer Network’s first institutional investment.
These funds will enable the FinTech company to reach the more than 120 million smallholder farmers across India, as well as explore opportunities in India’s rural markets.
Harvesting Farmer Network was founded during the Covid-19 pandemic to reduce friction between farmers and buyers, initially by enabling them to connect directly on Twitter.
Since then, over $500m of crops, consisting of over 360 crop varieties have been listed on Harvesting Farmer Network’s platform from every state in India.
The FinTech company helps smallholder farmers in India to easily buy high-quality and affordable farm inputs, across financial services such as loans and insurance, as well as sell their crops to national and international customers.
As of August 2022, over 3.7 million farmers are digitally connected to the Harvesting Farmer Network platform. These farmers have increased their crop earnings by up to 2.5-times, Harvesting Farmer Network said.
HFN founder CEO Ruchit G Garg said, “At HFN, our goal is to help farmers realize their full potential by reducing the plethora of inefficiencies across the agriculture value chain. Simple and widely-available technologies like WhatsApp and Twitter have allowed us to create massive data-driven farmer co-operatives, which allows farmers to negotiate better rates for farm inputs and more competitive prices for outputs.
“Our farmer-first approach has enabled us to build unique trust with our farmer-partners, giving us a strong foundation for long-term growth. With this new backing from Social Capital, we will be able to accelerate our growth and further scale our platform as we look to give India’s 120 million smallholder farmers the opportunities they deserve.”
Earlier in the year, Social Capital joined the $30m pre-Series A funding round, which made of equity and debt.
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