India sees 152 Deals in Agritech Ventures in 2019: Report
The world’s leading agri food-tech research platform AgFunder says in its annual agri food-tech investing report for the year 2019 that India witnessed 152 deals in agritech space. Apart from India, other countries including Japan, Mexico, Kenya, Nigeria and Argentina also reported several deals.
The report further states that China, India and UK had collectively represented 24 per cent of global deal activity during 2019.
In 2019 India saw 8 major investments by Blume Ventures and Omnivore, both based out of Mumbai. Also the IM Calcutta innovation park made 7 investments while InnoVen Capital made 6 major investments in India.
As per the report S2G Ventures from Chicago USA topped the list with 22 investments (including follow ups). The most active accelerator fund, the report said, was SOSV from Princeton USA with 44 investments (including follow-ups).
The 7th largest deal was groffers.com from India with $220 million and 13th largest deal was also in India with Bigbasket.com getting $150 million.
Agrifood tech is relatively a niche but rising segment of the start-ups along with venture capital space.
Like other industries, technology is playing a key role in the operation of the agrifood sector, according to AgFunder it is now a $7.8 trillion industry and the industry is also responsible for feeding the planet and employing well over 40 per cent of the global population.
The industrial agrifood sector of today is also largely inefficient compared to other industries, with an increasing number of demands and constraints being placed on it. These pressures include a growing global population set to reach 9 billion by 2050; climate change and global warming; environmental degradation; changing consumer demands; limited natural resources; food waste; consumer health issues and chronic disease.
The only concern is there was no mix or up-stream Agritech deal as both the big deals concern with downstream platform, though it was a global phenomenon as 62 per cent of overall deals across the globe were downstream. Overall upstream and downstream deals in India worth some $ 1 billion that is highly encouraging for start-ups to go for Agritech.
