FarMart Sees Fresh Swiss Funding

Fresh Proceeds

• The Gurugram based food supply platform, FarMart raised INR 24 crore as part of a new round from Swiss Asset manager, ResponAbility Investments.
• The startup will use these fresh proceeds to strengthen its efforts towards carbon efficient food supply chain as well as leverage ResponAbility’s expertise in adopting solution driven technologies.
• FarMart plans to make future investments into technology, research, development and automation.
• With this, FarMart has drummed up nearly USD 50 million to date including a USD 32 million Series B round in March 2022 from Matrix Partners India, General Catalyst and Omidyar Network India.
• FarMart’s B2B product is essentially a digitization of agricultural supplies and produce, putting buyers and sellers located near each other in touch, which it says eliminates several costs involved in transporting goods across the country. The company’s retailer footprint is currently heavy in central and northern Indian states, with relatively sparser presence in the south and Jammu & Kashmir.
• FarMart accommodates about 2000 food businesses securing partnerships with suppliers around 7000 pin codes.

Future of food

• The Farmart Founders address pertinent concerns of the industry, where is the food coming from? how is the food stored? How does the supply chain look like? What is optimised distribution?
• The infrastructure and investment in the food sector will see huge revolution with increased focus on cash flow management
• An integrated logistics park must be the way ahead.
• Building distilled tools to increase livelihood of everybody involved in the value chain while developing environment value chains remains key.
• Within a short span, FarMart managed to avoid 41,974 metric tonnes of carbon emission and 28,350 metric tones of food waste.

FartMarthesis

• FarMart germinated from a simple idea of connecting farmers who machinery to the ones who do not which today, is slated to become one of the top global food supply networks
• From product standpoint, FarMart plans to digitize small stakeholders whom the government does not really care about
• Digitization of food processing is crucial and FarMart will be providing these technologies to the SMEs
• As the founder said, they usually save 30% in logistics in the entire value chain and 36% less carbon as compared to the traditional value chain which will form the very core of their growth.

Editor’s Note