Led · Series E · Sep 2021

Founded in 2011 by Vamsi Krishna, Anand Prakash, Saurabh Saxena and Pulkit Jain, Vedantu began as a purely online tutoring platform and has since evolved into a hybrid K-12 education provider with more than 100 centres complementing its digital classes. The company employs over 1,200 teachers and serves in excess of 200,000 paid students. Vedantu reached unicorn status in September 2021 after a $100 million round led by ABC World Asia. Management is now concentrating on expanding both organically and through acquisitions, while enhancing its technology stack with artificial intelligence and adaptive learning content. An upcoming external equity round and secondary transaction are also being pursued to give early investors liquidity and to strengthen the balance sheet. These steps are intended to position the company for a potential public listing in 2027.

Participated · Series B · Aug 2021

v2Food produces plant-based ground beef, patties, sausages and a ready-made Bolognese sauce and emphasizes products made without GMOs, preservatives, colors or flavorings. The company’s products can be manufactured in standard meat production facilities, which it says aids rapid scaling and partnership with incumbent meat producers. v2Food has seen strong uptake in Australia and lists becoming No. 1 in its home market as a near-term goal under CEO and founder Nick Hazell. It is pursuing international expansion into Asia—where partner Burger King has launched a Whopper with v2Food’s patty—and into Europe, where its non-GMO, minimal-ingredient positioning is seen as an advantage. The company will use recent funding to increase manufacturing capacity, double R&D spend to accelerate new products and improvements, and explore building a local manufacturing facility in Australia to reduce import reliance and costs. No revenue or user metrics were disclosed in the article. v2food develops plant-based meat products using protein extracted from legumes to create mince and burgers that mimic conventional meat in taste and cooking. The company was founded in 2019 with support from CSIRO, Main Sequence Ventures and Competitive Foods Australia. Its products are available at thousands of outlets across Australia and through partners including Hungry Jack’s (Rebel Whopper), Burger King New Zealand, Drakes supermarkets, Woolworths (v2mince and v2burgers), Marley Spoon, Dinnerly, Soul Burger and Burger Urge. The business is scaling manufacturing and aims to complete a production facility in Wodonga to support growth. v2food plans to grow its team and continue launching products into new markets, including Asia and Europe. The company has raised a total of $113 million to date. v2food is an Australian plant-based meat startup developing products that look, cook and taste like meat. The company worked with Australia’s national science agency CSIRO to create its product formulations. Led by founder and CEO Nick Hazell, v2food is launching a range of plant-based meat products to be rolled out in outlets across Australia in the next few months. Its first product will be released in partnership with Hungry Jack’s Australia as the Rebel Whopper. The company raised $35m in a Series A to expand R&D efforts, including building a new research and production facility. That facility is planned to begin operation in regional Australia in 2020.

Led · Series C · Jan 2021

Cropin describes itself as the world’s largest deployed AI platform for food and agriculture, offering an AI-powered decision-support system for farmers and agribusinesses. Its core product, FIRST Potato, integrates crop-specific intelligence, real-time field data from sensors, satellite imagery, weather stations, IoT devices, Cropin’s proprietary data models, and predictive analytics to deliver plot-specific daily advisories. The platform helps farmers optimize irrigation, input usage, and residue management to adopt regenerative practices without compromising yield or quality, improving soil health and reducing environmental footprint. Cropin has secured a €700,000 AI deal under EIT Food’s Impact Funding Framework to scale the FIRST Potato deployment across Europe. Planned activities include scientific validation on pilot farms in Denmark and commercial pilots with two potato processors in Germany and the UK, in partnership with Aarhus University. The company is actively engaging in strategic commercial partnerships and is in advanced discussions with several UK and European agri-food brands, expecting to close multiple pilots before the end of the current financial year. Cropin offers an intelligent agriculture cloud platform (Cropin Cloud) and a suite of AI, machine-learning and remote-sensing SaaS solutions that help agribusinesses digitize operations from farm to fork. The company provides actionable, near–real-time farm data and predictive intelligence across crop types and geographies. Cropin reports partnerships with 250+ organizations, has digitized over 16 million acres, reached nearly 7 million farmers, and built intelligence for 400+ crops and 10,000+ crop varieties in 56 countries. Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Bangalore, Cropin focuses on making farms and harvests traceable, predictable, and sustainable. The company plans to expand Cropin Cloud’s capabilities, invest in go-to-market efforts, and develop next-generation predictive intelligence through Cropin AI Labs. Cropin says the new funding will support regional and industry expansion and solutions that address sustainable agriculture and global food security. CropIn offers SaaS and data solutions—notably SmartFarm (farm and agronomy management) and SmartRisk (machine-learning predictive analytics)—that help agri-enterprises improve efficiency, traceability, productivity, and sustainability across crop value chains. SmartRisk combines computer vision, deep learning, multispectral imagery, field scouting data, and hyperlocal weather to analyze over 388 crops and nearly 9,500 variants across trillions of data points. The company reports SmartRisk has processed more than 160 million hectares, has impacted 13 million acres and 4 million farmers to date, and could potentially reach 70 million farmers in the next 3–5 years. Smallholder farmers served by CropIn’s platforms have seen crop-yield increases of nearly 25% in the first year after adopting recommended practices. CropIn is investing the new capital to deepen AI capabilities, continue innovating SmartRisk, and expand globally—recently opening an Amsterdam office and hiring local leaders to drive growth in Europe. With partnerships spanning development finance institutions and government entities in 52 countries, CropIn focuses on digitization, predictability, traceability, financial inclusion, climate-smart agriculture, and sustainability. CropIn provides SmartFarm, a ground-to-cloud technology platform for plot-level farm management that is deployed through agribusinesses' field agents to enable B2B2F operations. The company also develops a machine-learning-based risk product called SmartRisk. It currently monitors about 3 million acres across 2 million farmers and serves 180+ customers, including large agribusinesses, banks, government bodies and development agencies, across 29 countries. CropIn plans to scale its platform in India and globally to monitor more than 10 million actively monitored acres across 7 million farmers. The company is co-founded by Krishna Kumar, Kunal Prasad and Chittaranjan Jena and is based in Bengaluru. Financially, the startup has raised a total of $12M to date. CropIn Technology Solutions is a Bengaluru-based agri-tech startup founded in 2010 by Krishna Kumar that provides a cloud-based software platform to help farmers track produce and consignments. Its offering includes enterprise resource planning and business intelligence with a built-in traceability system and tools to manage the field workforce. The platform collaborates with participants across the supply chain to monitor the status of farm produce. CropIn plans to invest the recent funding in technology, data science and predictive technologies to detect and predict crops in different regions. The company has raised about $4 million to date; the current pre-Series A amount was undisclosed. In August 2016 it raised $2 million from Denmark’s Sophia Investment ApS in a transaction that valued the company at $12 million.