Semaai, an agritech startup based in Indonesia, has raised $1.65 million in a bridge funding round led by Accion Venture Lab and XA Network. Existing investors such as Beenext and Sequoia Capital India's Surge took part in the fundraising as well.
Semaai's total funding now stands at US$2.9 million.
Semaai CEO and co-founder Yoga Anindito told Tech in Asia that the new funds will be used to expand the firm's farming outputs business with market links. He believes that this will help farmers and agri MSMEs maximise their income potential.
“We will also expand digital advisory services for agri MSMEs and build new services to help them gain access to agriculture production equipment that is affordable and located close by,” Anindito explains.
Anindito, the former CEO of agri distributor Hasana, co-founded Semaai with Abhishek Gupta and Gaurav Batra in April 2021.
Semaai began with agricultural inputs and later expanded into on-farm (agri-advisory and agritech) and agriculture outputs (such as buying and selling crops).
The company offers a marketplace app for the sale of agricultural products such as seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, equipment, and services such as harvesting and drone sprayers.
Meanwhile, Anindito stated that Semaai supplies crops to B2C startups and supermarket chains. He did not, however, reveal the names of these companies.
Semaai obtains products and crops from its partnerships with MSMEs and agri retailers. Anindito said the company saw a 37x growth in monthly transactions and a 20x bump in revenue in 2022.
Semaai currently has a presence in nearly 3,000 villages, with a focus on Central Java. Anindito said it had no plans to expand outside the province yet.
“We are aware that expanding into new areas in the agriculture sector is costly, so we focus on our services first. We don’t want to enter new area and sink,” he says.
Anindito believes that the agritech sector is unaffected by the current economic conditions, which have weighed on the startup industry over the last year, because "everyone needs to eat."
The agricultural sector employs nearly 29% of Indonesia's workforce, lending credence to his assertion.
The CEO also emphasises that Semaai has been committed to long-term growth since its inception. He adds that the company's strategy for dealing with the current economic conditions has not changed.
"We do not lay off employees or reduce pay. "We were quite conservative in terms of finances and disciplined in execution from day one," Anindito says.
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