Agro.Club, the digital agribusinesses platform that connects farmers, retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers across the agriculture value chain closed a $5M Series A round, co-led by the agri-focused VC Rabo Frontier Ventures and the Greek VentureFriends. The round was also joined by some of the previous investors of Agro.Club Speedinvest and Elevator Ventures and by some agriculture industry executives. The funds will be used to fuel the international expansion of the company in Western Europe and the Americas.
By using fintech, the platform serves as a bridge between input suppliers and grain buyers, and farmers and helps companies that deal with seed and crop protection and animal nutrition to optimize the entire process of managing relations with distributors and farmers. The fintech features of Agro.Club allow it to offer its users factoring, invoice financing, and credit solutions.
The market need for connected agribusinesses
Before starting Agro.Club, the CEO, and founder of the company Egor Kirin has gained valuable first-hand experience in the agriculture industry by working in large international agri corporations. “Being an industry insider and managing large ag businesses around the world, I observed first hand the inefficiencies that the whole value chain experiences due to lack of connectivity, transparency, and immediacy of data and insights across the full value chain,” Kirin told The Recursive. With Agro.Club he wanted to solve this market gap and connect the full value chain of stakeholders to enable more efficient transactions.
Besides being a marketplace for agribusinesses, Agro.Club also provides crop marketing, agriculture input sales, as well as community and marketing services. “ Our platform is not a marketplace, we not only connect the industry members, but also empower them with commercial effectiveness tools, provide a variety of value-added engagement to the farmers, and offer fintech solutions to make transactions more secure and to open up access to efficient capital,” Kirin explained.
The founder also shared that Agro.Club has created an efficient go-to-market model by making its platform country-agnostic, allowing the company to enter any international market fairly easily.
The future of Agro.Club and its agribusiness platform
After raising a seed round at the beginning of last year and entering the North American market, Agro.Club expanded its team to 70 people and managed to reach $40M in transaction volume for 2020. The company will use the freshly raised funds for geographic expansion to Spain and the UK first and then plans to spread across Western Europe and the Americas.
“Our Series A comes in time as we are rapidly scaling with our customers across multiple markets in Europe and the Americas. VentureFriends has always been on our top list of VCs that we wanted to work with based on their expertise and approach,” Kirin commented. Plans for the future also include team expansion and more investments into product development.
