DeHaat acquires agri-marketplace, Helicrofter

 
Agri-tech startup, DeHaat has completed its third acquisition in a row with the buyout of Maharashtra-based B2B agri-input marketplace startup, Helicrofter. DeHaat’s co-founder and CEO Shashank Kumar said that the integration of Helicrofter’s business will encompass more than 2,000 agri-input retailers & and 30 sellers across Maharashtra, DeHaat has now added another major Indian agricultural belt to their already expansive geographical footprint. DeHaat was last valued at $450 million with a $115 million fundraise in October, 2021.
 
With a full-stack technological infrastructure at its core, DeHaat serves over 700,000 farmers across Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The addition of Helicrofter to their roster comes in line with the goal of geographical expansion, as it marks DeHaat’s entry into Maharashtra.
 
Founded in 2020 by Siddhartha Choudhary, Helicrofter is a farm input e-commerce platform designed to do away with supply chain inefficiencies in the rural ecosystem. Despite the pandemic, Helicrofter has been generating revenue since the very first month of its inception and has achieved annual revenue in excess of Rs 50 crore. Prior to this, Siddhartha was the CEO at DestaGlobal, a farm input e-commerce startup, where he played a critical role in building the complete tech stack for input market linkage and enabling the company to drive revenue. He started his career with Monsanto where he worked as Product Manager for the cotton and vegetable business.
 
“At DeHaat, we have built a crop and service agnostic, farmer-first model. Owing to our full-stack approach, we have been generating amazing responses from all our new, as well as existing geographies. We have been consistent with 35-40 per cent growth in our network on a month-on-month basis, and this acquisition will cement our footprint into Maharashtra and thereby the Western part of India, which forms a major agri cluster for the nation. Over the years, DeHaat’s micro-entrepreneur network has grown to 4,000 in Eastern and Central parts of India. With the addition of Helicrofter’s network, we will now add a wide range of prospective micro-entrepreneurs from Western India to this list,” Amrendra Singh, co-founder – DeHaat, said.
 
DeHaat provides farmers with access to over 3,200 agricultural inputs, combined with AI-based customised crop advisory on pest & disease management, delivered via mobile app and call centres. The platform also aggregates more than 30 crops from farmers on their network and directly supplies it to over 600 commodity bulk buyers, including retail chains, e-commerce players, FMCG giants, and SME food processors. In the last six months, DeHaat has also integrated financial services into its list of offerings. Having been backed by some of the biggest names in the business like Prosus Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, RTP Global, FMO and Omnivore, DeHaat closed their latest round of funding in October of 2021 by raising $115 Mn led by Sofina and Lightrock.
 
“We, at Helicrofter, are delighted to be joining hands with DeHaat. This union will undoubtedly help us add more value to the farmers and other stakeholders by strengthening our offerings, and accessing the wide variety and quality of services, as well as network access, that DeHaat possesses. What makes this partnership even more ideal for us is the complementing ideologies and synergy of function that will enable us to work together in materialising our vision for the farmer communities that we jointly serve. I am happy that all employees of Helicrofter are settling in well and are eager to scale DeHaat to newer heights,” Siddhartha Choudhary, Founder, Helicrofter  said.