August 25, 2022, A premier platform for agricultural technology in India, Harvesting Farmer Network (HFN), has secured USD 4 million from Social Capital, a Silicon Valley-based technology investment company run by Chamath Palihapitiya. HFN has raised its first institutional round of funding, which it will use to contact India’s more than 120 million smallholder farmers and investigate the potential in the country’s rural markets.
By giving them access to a venue for collective bargaining, Harvesting Farmer Network assists smallholder farmers in India—those with less than 2 hectares of land, as defined by the UN—in increasing their income. Farmers can scale and expand their businesses using HFN’s trusted platform to buy high-quality and reasonably priced farm inputs, access financial services like loans and insurance, and sell their crops to domestic and foreign customers. These luxuries are typically only available to large-scale farms.
HFN’s founder and CEO, Ruchit G. Garg, stated:
“To help farmers reach their full potential, HFN works to eliminate numerous inefficiencies throughout the entire value chain of agriculture. We have been able to build large, data-driven farmer cooperatives thanks to accessible, cost-effective technologies like WhatsApp and Twitter. These cooperatives enable farmers to bargain better rates for farm inputs and more aggressive prices for commodities.
We have developed a certain level of trust with our farmer partners thanks to our farmer-first strategy, providing us with a solid base for long-term growth. We will be able to scale our platform even further and grow even faster thanks to this fresh funding from Social Capital as we work to provide India’s 120 million smallholder farmers with the chances they deserve.”
Partner at Social Capital Jay Zaveri said:
“There is a pressing need for greater and better food security in an increasingly complex geopolitical world and amid a worsening climate disaster. Given that India is one of the world’s major bread producers, we are thrilled to work with HFN to provide the more than 120 million smallholder farmers there with a safe, secure, and empowering platform. Our objective is to make it possible for Indian households to have access to high-quality agricultural products and for farmers to use HFN to create a successful living.”
More about the business:
Ruchit G. Garg founded the business after spending more than a decade working in the US for companies like Microsoft before relocating to India to work with smallholder farmers. By August 2022, every state in India—including farmers in remote eastern regions like Nagaland and northern locales like Pulwama, Jammu, and Kashmir, as well as Kutch, Gujarat—had more than 3.7 million farmers connected to HFN via various digital platforms.
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, has secured USD 4 million from Social Capital, a Silicon Valley-based technology investment company run by Chamath Palihapitiya. HFN has raised its first institutional round of funding, which it will use to contact India's more than 120 million smallholder farmers and investigate the potential in the country's rural markets.){kind=link}