India-based agritech firm Gramophone banks $3.4m in new funding

Existing investors Info Edge, Asha Impact, and Better Capital also participated in the round.

Gramophone provides a resource platform for farmers to access a package of services that includes crop advisory and weather information, along with seeds and affordable products for crop protection and crop nutrition, among others. It also allows partners to gain direct access to farmers and real-time market data.

It will use funds from the capital raise for customer acquisition and the further development of its full-stack platform to maximize the farmers’ incomes, according to the report.

“We have seen strong farmer adoption with a year-on-year 15% to 20% increase in the wallet share of the customers,” said Tauseef Khan, co-founder and CEO of Gramophone.

The company claims to have provided its services to 550,000 farmers who have gained up to 20% in cost-effectiveness through the platform’s inputs marketplace. Farmers have also increased their yields by 40% by acting upon Gramophone’s advisories, the report noted.

The agritech firm has raised a total of US$4.5 million in funding over three rounds, according to data from Crunchbase. It raised about US$3.2 million from Info Edge in August of last year.

Recently, another agritech startup, Arya, raised US$21 million in a series B round led by fintech-focused Quona Capital through a mix of equity and debt.