New Delhi: Gramophone – a full-stack agri-tech platform has raised $10 million round led by Z3Partners, a market leading early growth investor that brings decades of experience in investing in leading technology and digital businesses like DealShare, Cyfirma, and prior Fund investments like Ofbusiness, BigBasket, Pepperfry and MedGenome, etc. Gramophone will use the proceeds towards geographic expansion, marketing, technology development and M&A.
Existing investor, Info Edge, has doubled down in this round along with participation from other existing investors, Asha Impact, and Siana Capital. Other new investors in the round include Amit Sharma from erstwhile Sunrise Group, Sumeet Kanwar from Verity, and Chona Family Office (Havmor Group). These family offices bring vast experience in building agri and food businesses.
Gramophone is a market leading agri-tech company that provides Agronomy Services, Input and Output products in Madhya Pradesh, Chattishgarh, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan by way of an eCommerce marketplace.
With a one-stop solutions for farmers, Gramophone aims to make farming intelligent for farmers and double their income. Today 1 million+ farmers are benefitting from Gramophone’s products and services owing to which the company has seen a 4x increase in revenues over last year and expects to grow aggressively.
Tauseef Khan, Co-founder & CEO, Gramophone said, “Our mission is to improve the profitability of farming ecosystem across India. We are building a new age Agriculture Company keeping farmers at the centre. We have seen a huge shift in adoption of technology solutions by the new age farmers. With this investment we will double down on investing in technologies that lower costs, improves transparency and empowers the local community of agri entrepreneurs with more earning opportunities in rural areas. We are excited to welcome Z3Partners and other new investors in this journey and deepen our partnership with Info Edge, Asha Impact and Siana Capital”.
With a strong distribution and access to farm level data, the company is working on partnerships with financial institutions to launch micro insurance and lending products for the farming ecosystem which includes the farmers, input retailers and the output traders as well.
Gramophone started as Agronomy led, Agri-Input Commerce Company from MP, founded by IIT & IIM alumnus Tauseef Khan, Nishant Vats Mahatre & Harshit Gupta. In the last 2 years it has become a full-stack technology platform by adding premium farm management solutions, and Gram Vyapaar – an output marketplace.
“We at Z3PARTNERS are very excited to partner with Gramophone on this journey of bringing eCommerce to Rural India. Tauseef, Nishant, and Harshit’s understanding of Agri-Sciences and eCommerce and their relationships with Farmers as their end customers has been instrumental in their growth and success so far. We are excited to be part of a story of bringing digital and technology solutions to our Farmers in India.” Said Gautam Patel, Managing Partner, Z3Partners.
Kitty Agarwal, Partner at Info Edge Ventures, said, “We have now been partners with the Gramophone team for nearly four years and have seen tremendous growth in their evolution from being an advisory led input commerce company to a full-stack Intelligent Farming platform that does end-to-end input to output linkage for farmers and retailers. Rapid adoption of technology in rural areas is leading to bridging of information asymmetry and market access for farmers. We are excited to continue backing the team in this journey.”
