AgroStar, a Pune-based agro-tech startup, said that it has acquired $70 million (INR. 527 crores) in its Series D funding round to accelerate the growth of its technical platform through omnichannel expansion and market connections.

Hero Enterprise, global asset management Schroders Capital, Evolvence, and the UK's development financing organisation CDC spearheaded this funding round. Aavishkaar Capital, Rabo Frontier Ventures, Bertelsmann, Chiratae Ventures, and Accel were among the established Agro star investors. The Raine Group served as the transaction's only advisor.

Shardul Sheth, AgroStar's co-founder and chief executive officer, stated, “we are now doubling down on our omnichannel strategy to provide a seamless experience to our farmers across various touchpoints both digital and physical. We plan to utilize the funding to strengthen our tech platform, hire senior talent, expand into new categories, geographies and scale to over 5,000 AgroStar branded retail stores to fuel our omnichannel strategy. We will also expand our services to provide meaningful market linkage value additions,"

AgroStar was founded by Sitanshu Sheth and Shardul Sheth with the objective of "Helping Farmers Win." It uses data and technology to address farmers' issues with access to high-quality agri-inputs and to close the knowledge gap created by traditional farming practiseToday, AgroStar is India's largest digital farmer network and agricultural inputs platform, servicing over five million farmers in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat.

Low crop production is a problem in the $50 billion agri-input sector, which is hampered by a lack of expertise and availability to quality products. AgroStar has filled this void by creating a multilingual content-driven commerce platform for farmers. AgroStar's platform is rapidly expanding, with its mobile app surpassing the 5 million download mark. Farmers use the AgroStar app to read and watch agronomy information, submit photographs of crop problems for guidance, share and comment on fellow farmer postings, search for Agri items using voice search, and transact on the site.

Sitanshu Sheth, co-founder and COO, stated, “the platform has seen a 10X growth in video content consumption over the last year. Our platform is easy to use for the Indian farmer and adds real value on the ground for them. We believe that this is just the beginning and foresee massive acceleration in digital adoption by 140 million-plus Indian farmers over the next few years.”