Rural social network Krishify announced that it has closed USD 6.2 million in Pre-Series A funding with the additional participation of agritech VC fund Omnivore alongside existing investors Ankur Capital, Omidyar Network India, and Orios Venture Partners. Krishify had already raised USD 2.7 million in August 2021, and has now closed the Pre-Series A round with an additional USD 3.5 million in funding.
With over 6.5 million downloads and 1.3 million monthly active users, Krishify is India’s largest social network for farmers and rural communities. Krishify is building India “agriverse”, where farmers, rural families, retailers, traders, and agribusiness companies can seamlessly discover, interact, and transact among themselves. Leveraging machine learning, AI, and NLP, Krishify’s app delivers highly personalized experiences to agriverse participants.
Based in Gurugram, Krishify was founded in 2019 by IIT alumni Rajesh Ranjan, Manish Agrawal, and Avinash Kumar. Rajesh was previously a Product Manager with Analytics Vidhya, and earlier co-founded Instano, a virtual shopping mobile app that was later acquired by MagicTiger. Manish previously worked as a Senior Engineer at Rivigo while Avinash earlier was a UPSC aspirant.
Krishify plans to use this round for accelerating pan-India growth and to further refine the technology for an enhanced user experience in the agriverse. Krishify is also accelerating monetization on the network via advertising, lead generation, and marketing services for companies targeting rural consumers.
Commenting on the investment, Rajesh Ranjan, Co-Founder of Krishify, said, “We are excited to partner with Omnivore in our journey to build India’s agriverse. More and more Indian farmers are connecting via Krishify every day, as the network breaks down geographic barriers and helps people interact to access knowledge and do business. We recently met a third-generation guava farmer in Rajasthan who was selling record numbers of guava saplings to farmers across Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra who only could have ever discovered him through the Krishify app.”
Mark Kahn, Managing Partner at Omnivore, also noted, “Rising smartphone penetration in rural India has created an opportunity to build a farmer-centric social network for India’s 130 million cultivators and their families, a total population of over 600 million. Krishify is building a content-centric agriverse to help farmers and rural communities realize greater success and joy through peer-to-peer engagement.”
