EXCLUSIVE: Agrofy adds $30m in Yara-led Series C round to grow ‘agfintech’ services

Argentine farmer marketplace Agrofy has raised $30 million in Series C funding. The deal takes its total funding to date to $66 million across four rounds.

Yara Growth Ventures, the VC arm of Norwegian agrochemicals giant Yara International, led the Series C financing. Several of Agrofy’s existing investors, as well as unnamed private backers, participated in the round.

Agrofy’s other shareholders include Bunge Ventures, Cresud, Syngenta Ventures, SP Ventures, Fall Line Capital, Acre Venture Partners, and Brasil Agro.

The Rosario-based startup claims to be “the leading agribusiness online market in Latin America,” operating in nine countries across the region including its native Argentina. Starting out as an online marketplace, it lists around 150,000 products for farmers to purchase; it has since expanded into financial services.

It will use the fresh funding to strengthen its three core business areas: its e-commerce platform which connects farmers with a variety agricultural products; its farmer fintech suite including the Agrofy Pay e-wallet and Agrofy Credits; and the expansion of its operations in Brazil, including the launch of Agrofy Pay in the country during H2 2022.

“In the context of the [Covid-19] pandemic, agriculture has increased the pace of its digitization process. We have been working in this direction since long before, and we have capitalized,” said Agrofy co-founder and CEO Maximiliano Landrein.

“Closing this new investment round allows us to consolidate the transactional product and the payments offer, which also gives us the possibility to provide a better online shopping experience to the customer. [The capital] gives us the opportunity to continue improving our products and start developing new ones [focused] on business development to consolidate our value proposition as an ‘agfintech,’ through the growth of Agrofy Pay services and the incorporation of Agrofy Credits, a service to qualify producers and grant them loans through the platform.”

“One of the things we like most about Agrofy is the potential they have for future expansion,” said Erkki Aaltonen, managing director, Yara Growth Ventures. “Maximiliano and Alejandro [Larosa, Agrofy co-founder and president] have worked steadily towards a strategy that has seen the company expand geographically in Latin America, as well as expand with new offerings to serve their customers.”

Francisco Jardim, CEO and general partner at SP Ventures, added the startup acted with agility amid the Covid-19 pandemic, and has “consolidated itself as an absolute leader in the digitization process of the [value] chain.”

According to research from AgFunder, the biggest investment in Agribusiness Marketplaces — a category covering online marketplaces for farm inputs, equipment, and other products — in H1 2021 went to Indonesia’s TaniHub, which raised $65.5 million for its Series B round back in May. Among the other top 10 Agribusiness Marketplace deals by investment dollars in H1 2021 were rounds closed by India’s DeHaat, UK-headquartered but Africa-focused Wefarm, and US-based Bushel, which specifically targets grain farmers and traders [disclosure: AgFunder is AFN‘s parent company and an investor in both DeHaat and Wefarm.]