Precision agriculture platform Fasal raises $4mn in pre-Series A round

Precision agriculture platform Fasal announced on November 22 that it had raised $4 million in pre-Series A round led by 3one4 Capital with participation from existing investors Omnivore and Wavemaker Partners.

The other investors in this round include Genting Ventures (Malaysia), The Yield Lab Asia-Pacific, Antares Investments, and Sandeep Singhal of Nexus.

Fasal is a full-stack Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered Internet of Things (IoT) Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for progressive horticulture. Using on-farm sensors and scientific algorithms, Fasal delivers farm- and crop-specific actionable insights to farmers in vernacular languages. The platform is also working on a range of new services including fruit and vegetable (F&V) market linkages and parametric crop insurance.

To date, the start-up has helped save more than 9 billion litres of water from irrigation, reduced pesticide expenditure by about 60 per cent, and increased yields across 40,000+ acres of farmland. 

Fasal will use the funds raised in this round to expand their business across India and Southeast Asia, strengthen their full-stack services, and ramp up hiring for their sales and marketing, agronomy, and technology teams.

Based out of Bangalore, Fasal was founded in 2018.

In a press statement, Co-Founders Ananda Verma and Shailendra Tiwari said, “As government policies are evolving to support more robust and open supply chains, there has never been a bigger incentive for horticulture farmers to grow more and grow better. Fasal's full-stack offering will fuel a rapid transition of Indian horticulture farming from gut-based legacy operations into knowledge-led profitable businesses.”

Anurag Ramdasan, Partner at 3one4 said, "Technology interventions are key to overcoming the plateau in agricultural productivity. Fasal’s precision agriculture solution is perfectly packaged for the needs of horticulture farmers, where advisory is both necessary and welcome.”

Mark Kahn, Managing Partner of Omnivore, commented, “Fasal has proven the fact that farmers are eager to adopt precision agriculture technologies. In the years to come, we foresee Fasal playing an important role in driving sustainable agriculture and becoming a valued brand in the global horticulture space."

Gavin Lee, General Partner at Wavemaker Partners in Southeast Asia, said, “Coming from farming families, Ananda and Shailendra knew the exact problems that farmers faced given their lack of access to crop-specific insights. To see them solve this gap with a powerful yet affordable and easy-to-set-up product for farmers is truly worthwhile.”