The Venture Intelligence Blog

US-based AgFunder has a podcast interview with Mark Kahn, Co-Founder of  pioneering India-focused agri-business focused VC firm Omnivore Capital. In the interview, Kahn contrasts the Indian agtech startup scene with that in the US and what he expects for the sector going forward. Venture Intelligence is India's longest serving provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India. Click Here to Sign Up for the FREE Weekly Edition of the Deal Digest: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

Agri-Biz Investments rise 75% in first 6 months of 2013   Last week, publicly listed packaged rice exporter Kohinoor Foods agreed to sell a 20% stake for almost Rs.113 crores ($18.8 million) to Al Dahra Holdings, an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm which makes investments around the world to secure food supplies to the UAE. Kohinoor has also entered into a joint venture with the investor to develop and manage a rice processing and storage facility in Abu Dhabi. The JV will source a minimum of 25,000 MT of basmati rice per year from Kohinoor. In March 2013, Qatar-based Hassad Food had acquired a 69% stake another rice exporter - Bush Foods Overseas - for $135 million. The deal fetched Bush Food's investor, StanChart Private Equity - the winner of the Best Private Equity Investor of the Year Award at the Venture Intelligence APEX'13 Awards in February - a 2.5 times return on Rs.110 crore ($24.4 million) investment it had made in April 2011, according to the Venture Intelli...

The Hindu has a profile of R.G. Chandramogan, founder of Chennai-based Hatsun Agro Products , best known for it Arun Icecream (launched in the 1970s) and Arokya Milk (1980s) brands. While frozen dessert lovers were lapping up whatever came from the stables of Arun, Chandramogan busied himself with another venture — the dairy business. In 1995 he started Arokya milk. “We were procuring milk for our ice creams and so this idea came about. Today Arokya sees an annual turnover of Rs.1,300 crores. We also manufacture butter, milk powder, ghee and curd. We are associated with 3,50,000 farmers and buy milk from 8,000 villages. We operate from nine different factories and our people travel 4,20,000 km to collect and distribute milk,” he adds. Hatsun dairy products are available across the country. Hatsun has its dairy plants in Kanchipuram, Palacode, Salem, Madurai, Belgaum, Honnali. ...Hatsun produces 18 lakh to 20 lakh litres of milk per day. Twelve lakh litres are used up for milk and milk...

Edited excerpts from the press release: Ventureast Life Fund, an early growth and growth stage fund focused on the food and agriculture, clean environment and healthcare delivery sectors, has invested Rs.25 crores in VKS Farms , a Coimbatore-based, integrated meat processing company. Shekhar Kundur, General Partner of Ventureast, joins the Board of VKS Farms. The funding will be utilized for completing VKS's back-end operations, and expanding its retailing capability. VKS's differentiation stems from its diverse product mix of chicken, egg, meat and salt; integrated poultry supply-chain, spanning 'grandparents' to commercial birds facilities to processing to retailing; exports to over 30 countries, besides domestic presence; and state-of-the-art processing plant built to international standards. Shekhar Kundur said, “Hygienic meat retailing is the way forward in this unorganized market. With a comprehensive and efficient supply chain in place, we expect VKS Farms t...

Economic Times recently published an article on the various types of agri-businesses are increasingly attracting VC attention. In an accompanying piece , Sandeep Singhal and Manoj Gupta of Nexus Ventures, provided their outlook on the sector. The agriculture sector presents a tremendous opportunity, given its size and large-scale inefficiencies, but building a large company is not easy. It requires domain knowledge, as local issues such as weather, pests, soil conditions, and water availability, and global factors such as commodity price swings can play havoc with any plan. On the supply side, their business model has to support a dispersed network, with the support of field activities and the need to work in different languages. Depending on where they play in the ecosystem, the company's systems and processes should be able to handle large numbers of cash transactions and prevent fraud and leakage. All of this is further complicated by the need to manage risks related to governm...

Businessworld profiles a few companies that have made a success of contract farming. Most retail firms — from Reliance Retail through More (the Birlas’ chain) to Food Bazaar — have not been very successful in either building the infrastructure or integrating the supply chains. But a clutch of other firms that has focused on one end — contract farming as a method of sourcing produce — has found ways around the problem of supply-chain management, and let others handle the front end of the retail business. Some export, others sell to established retail chains, while others sell to captive buyers, and a few reach out to the McDonald’s and Subways of the world. ...KS Oils, an edible oils manufacturer in Morena in Madhya Pradesh, sources, processes and sells its own brand of mustard oil in the Indian market. Working with over 2,000 farmers, the group has consolidated 5,000 acres of farm land in the Chambal area of Madhya Pradesh. “This initiative of working with farmers is very recent,” say...