Jakarta, 11 July 2022 – AgriAku, an Indonesian-based agritech start-up, today announced its USD 35 million (IDR 520 billion) oversubscribed Series A round led by Alpha JWC Ventures. Returning investors MDI Ventures (ARISE, Centauri, MDI Growth) and Go-Ventures also participated.
AgriAku moreover successfully secured funding from two new marquee institutional investors, BRI Ventures and Mandiri Capital Indonesia, making Agriaku the only agritech company funded by all 3 of Indonesia’s largest state-owned enterprises’ venture capital funds. In addition, AgriAku also onboarded new strategic investors such as Gentree Fund, K3 Ventures, and Thai Wah Public Company to help the company scale internationally in the future. They are joined by other key venture firms in this round, including Alto Partners, InnoVen Capital, and Mercy Corps Social Venture Funds.
AgriAku also welcomed two additions to the senior leadership team. Abraham Soedjito joined the startup as its Chief Strategy Officer. Prior to joining AgriAku, Soedjito served as Chief Product Officer at Traveloka’s Financial Services in Thailand, with prior experience in blue-chip institutions such as Kearney and Lehman Brothers. Valmik Mirani also joined AgriAku as Chief Commercial Officer. Mirani previously served as Assistant Vice President at Paytm, India’s leading mobile payments and financial services company, and Vice President of Marketplace Strategy Office at Tokopedia. Adding Soedjito as CSO and Mirani as CCO with their proven expertise in digital financial services and supply chain will strengthen Agriaku’s tech-driven solutions and further improve operational outcomes.
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Revolutionizing Agribusiness in Indonesia
Founded in May 2021 by Irvan Kolonas and Danny Handoko, AgriAku aims to significantly improve farmer productivity and livelihood through its unique technology. Agriculture represents an important sector, contributing 13.7% to Indonesia’s GDP (FY 2020), however, the upstream supply chain for agricultural input products such as seeds, fertilizers, and agrochemicals, is highly inefficient and disorganized. All stakeholders throughout the supply chain, from suppliers, retailers, to farmers, face the same problems – volatility of supply and prices, inefficient manual workflows, inadequate logistics, and limited access to financing.
“Upstream agricultural markets are highly fragmented. This makes it hard for farmers, suppliers, and retailers to get what they need, when they need it: volatility of supply and prices may mean they can’t count on access to vital inputs; inefficient manual workflows slow the entire value chain down; and limited access to formal financing means that many farmers can’t afford to make the investments they need in their farms,” said Irvan Kolonas, Co-Founder and President of AgriAku.
“Our mission at AgriAku is to solve problems in the agriculture value chain, from principals and suppliers all the way down to farmers. We believe that technology can make a difference in the way our food is produced, and we are on a mission to use technology to help improve farmer productivity and livelihoods. By connecting agricultural supply stores with manufacturers or first-level distributors, we allow farmers to procure a full catalog of agri-inputs products with ease and at a nominally competitive price point.”
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Starting with a B2B input marketplace, Agriaku facilitates agribusiness activities for suppliers, retailers, and farmers. Input products are sourced from trustworthy, reliable suppliers and connected directly to retailers, also known as Farmer Stores (“Toko Tani”). Farmer Stores play an important role for AgriAku as they distribute input products directly to smallholder farmers, and will eventually serve as an acquisition channel, enabling AgriAku to tap into farmers’ demand and offer their innovative products and services.
Since its launch, AgriAku has significantly grown its monthly user transactions significantly, and expanded its coverage to over 500+ cities nationwide, with Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi as its top three areas of operation.
The startup will be focusing on optimizing unit economics and expanding its revenue streams. AgriAku plans to offer value-add services such as logistics and financing to distributors and manufacturers to help them scale their operations through the platform. Kolonas said that data services, transparency over supply-chain information, logistics, and financing are vital areas for product development. Such new features on top of their B2B marketplace will enable AgriAku to be a comprehensive agribusiness solution.
With the fresh funding, AgriAku will continue to strengthen market penetration by growing its farmer stores and distributors network moreover expand its business further across the value chain, such as offering agriculture outputs, offering farmers access to markets, and monetizing their harvest. AgriAku also plans to expand its product and technology teams to continue to innovate and deepen the capabilities of its product ecosystem, to capitalize on unsolved inefficiencies in the market.
“Agriculture is one of the largest contributors to Indonesia’s economy, yet the sector still faces a lot of inefficiencies in getting products to local farmer stores (Tokotanis) and smallholder farmers. AgriAku is in a prime position to empower the Tokotanis to secure a consistent supply of agricultural input products with transparent pricing, expand their supplier network, and obtain the necessary financing to grow their business. We believe AgriAku will revolutionize the agriculture landscape in Indonesia. We are excited to partner and be a part of AgriAku’s journey,” said Eko Kurniadi, Partner at Alpha JWC Ventures.
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AgriAku leadership believes that not only the company has the right strategy as its competitive advantage, but also the collective laser-focused mindset. “At AgriAku, we focus on solving our customer pain points and adding values in the overall Agri market in Indonesia and beyond. With this funding, we will focus on monetization fundamentals and concentrate on important ideas, execution, and delivery,” Danny Handoko, Co-Founder and CEO of AgriAku.
This bias towards successful execution is further echoed by Go-Ventures and ARISE as returning investors: “AgriAku has demonstrated outstanding execution in their goal of digitizing the agricultural inputs market. We look forward to continuing to support them as they improve agricultural productivity in the country,” said Aditya Kamath, Partner at Go-Ventures.
“It’s been an honor to witness such a stellar execution by the AgriAku team since day 0. We are proud to continuously back the team for the third time and beyond to empower more TokoTanis and other agriculture stakeholders across the archipelago,” said Aldi Adrian Hartanto, Partner at ARISE
