In the last few years, India has witnessed an impressive progress in the start-up front with the count touching 72,993 as on 30th June 2022. Out of this, 1495 start-ups are focusing specifically on agriculture and allied sectors aspiring to solve some of the greatest challenges in the context of food and nutrition, food safety, climate-friendly agriculture, and ecological sustainability. In this context, Samunnati, India’s Open Agri Network, launched a unique initiative “Samaarambh” on 15th August 2020. Samaarambh aims to nurture the agri-focused start-ups striving to address chronic challenges of the agri value chain and contribute towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
Samaarambh – The new beginning
As Samaarambh just turned two, it emerged as one of the prominent customised financial services providers to agri-focused start-ups across the value chain with disbursals of nearly Rs. 145 Crores and with an AUM of Rs. 32 Crores.
But there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Finance is but one of the many essential factors required for a start-up to succeed such as market linkage, advisory and ecosystem approach. It also enables peer-to-peer (P2P) collaboration fostering cross-fertilization of ideas, and mutual sharing of valuable learnings within and beyond. All these are important for their success, which in turn will have huge, positive, and multi-faceted impacts particularly, on the vulnerable sections of India’s population that depend on agriculture and allied sectors for their livelihoods.
Samaarambh boasts of an impressive diversity in its portfolio of close to 100 start-ups. Specific thematic focus areas that the start-ups are working include:
- Climate Smart Agriculture (e.g., Solar-powered machinery)
- Quality assurance/assessment
- Organic/IPM based crop production
- Aggregation – Agri-inputs
- Aggregation – Agri Output/Market linkage platform
- Allied sectors (Animal Husbandry, Silk rearing, Wild honey)
- Food processing
- Farm management/technology, and
- Agri-Fintech for financial inclusion
Solutions from Samaarambh – Holistic, Diverse and Customized
Finance, being the prominent point of intervention, includes channel financing, revolving working capital, and mid-term project financing to strategic long-term financing from Rs. 5 lakhs to over Rs. 5 Crores. Besides, mentoring the start-ups through relevant market connections and helping them with market linkage & solution deployment turns out to be a critical support for the success of the start-ups as below.
- Connecting new age start-ups with FPOs- when the start-up’s idea already has been tested, and requires market connect (e.g., Krishitantra, Fruga Labs)
- P2P connects: Start-ups connecting with other start-ups with similar impact space and complementary nature. As an offshoot, organizing closed-door sessions with start-ups of similar space and complementary capabilities- for example- water cluster discussions impacting various subsectors within the water sector.
- Connecting with Samunnati’s agri enterprise/trade network, finding buyers/sellers in B2B space, for their products.
Ecosystem approach – Engagement with incubators & accelerators
True to its ecosystem approach of working with the value chain stakeholders, Samaarambh is fostering collaborations with 20+ prominent incubators and accelerators like Indigram Labs, Pusa Krishi, IIM CIP, IIT Madras Research Park Incubation Center, Villgro, Deshpande Start-ups etc., in a mutually beneficial way. Recently, a memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed with RICH (Research and Innovation Circle of Hyderabad) to strengthen the piloting of products from the startups groomed under Samaarambh. Thus, Samunnati’s holistic ecosystem approach is helping some of the startups grow multi-fold.
As an incubator agnostic organisation and an ecosystem enabler, Samunnati is planning to expand the Samaarambh initiative extensively in future to ensure a large number of promising agri-focused start-ups are nurtured and strengthened for greater socio-economic impacts.
