Agrizy - Supercharging Indian Food Processing

When founders Vicky Dodani and Saket Chirania visited Mahua in Bhavnagar district of Gujarat, they observed numerous MSMEs struggling to grow their agrifood processing businesses. These MSMEs, often involved in dehydrating onions, garlic, and other vegetables, faced challenges like underutilized capacity, subpar quality standards, and limited access to working capital.

Recognizing a common pain point for many MSMEs, Agrizy developed a tech-enabled platform to bridge the gap between processors and large buyers. By sourcing global demand, upgrading processes, and facilitating access to working capital, Agrizy streamlined the agrifood supply chain, reducing food wastage, stabilizing prices, and ensuring food safety.

At Agrizy, they were quick to develop an institutional sales channel to source global demand, upgrading the processes and quality standards for these processors and enabling them to get working capital from formal lenders. This also ensured reduction in food wastage, stabilizing food prices and assuring food safety – thereby streamlining the overall agrifood processing ecosystem.

On the buyer side, large corporates which need to procure processed food have always faced issues with respect to inconsistency in the quality of the products, poor price discovery, fulfillment challenges and inflexibility of the current supply chain to customize the products as per their requirements. With its tech-centric B2B platform, Agrizy solved these pain points for the large buyers. Agrizy manages quality assurance throughout the supply chain right from procurement to processing to logistics for the end buyers. Agrizy’s tech-driven algorithms optimize for the final landing cost for the buyers which includes raw material cost, processing charges and logistics cost. Also, the in-house R&D capabilities allow the buyers to customize processed food products as per their needs.

Over the years, Agrizy has built demand channels, standardized quality parameters and improved credit access – for more than 150 MSME processors. Daksh Foods, one of Agrizy’s oldest MSME supplier, saw its efficiencies improve over the years, which increased its revenue by 25% after associating with Agrizy.

On the other hand, Agrizy serves more than 200 clients across India and overseas markets spanning Europe, North America, and Asia. Its customers talk about consistency in quality, competitive prices and on-time in-full deliveries and an overall professional experience in the industry marked by lack of high serviceability.

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Tapping Global Demand  With Technological Interventions

India’s food grain output is projected to reach a staggering $470 Billion by 2025 and the market is growing 9% annually, however only 10% of farm produce gets processed today. 

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This pales in comparison to global leaders like China (40%) and Western nations (60-80%). Fast changing end-consumer preferences are leading to higher expectations from the supply chain, but also providing significantly better opportunities for ecosystem players. Consumers today prefer more healthy products, custom-processed to meet their nutritional requirements, and are even re-imagining traditional products such as rice, atta etc. These changing consumer preferences require the product supply chains to re-invent themselves, upgrade their processing capabilities to meet the emerging demand. Simultaneously, the sector is also challenged by climate change, resource scarcity, and fluctuating market demands. Agrizy addresses these issues head-on with its comprehensive suite of solutions.

Hence we firmly believe that there is an opportunity for a B2B platform to disrupt the processor ecosystem, by leveraging technology and data to build market linkages, address the evolving needs for more value-added products, higher quality standards and on-time fulfillment. Agrizy offers a B2B platform to address these issues by connecting processors with buyers, improving quality, and streamlining supply chains. 

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Investing in Agrizy 

When we met Vicky and Saket we realized their ambitions of solving teething problems in this sector as they understood the logistical and thematic issues and global opportunity that exists in this sector. 

“What impressed us was their unshakeable belief in the potential of the agri-processing ecosystem and their relentless focus on solving for the inefficiencies in the system. Vicky and Saket bring on-ground market insights given their families’ background in the agri- processing ecosystem. This is aptly complemented by their technology experience from leading startups in the logistics and aggregation space such as BlackBuck, Bizongo, Zoomcar etc.” 

Agrizy optimizes supply-demand linkages and value-addition possibilities in agri processing supply chains. They operate as a platform for both supply and demand players, deploying tech-driven solutions for discovery and ordering, fulfillment and credit facilitation - helping processors upgrade their understanding of quality needs, reach better quality customers, maximize their capacity utilization and overall business outcomes.

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Tracing Agrizy’s Growth Journey

Since its inception in 2021, Agrizy has served over 100 institutional clients across domestic and international markets, including Europe, North America, and Asia. The platform has processed more than 100,000 MT of agrifood products, revolutionizing the industry for both processors and brands. 

"Since we issued the term sheet for our initial investment in March 2022, Agrizy has grown monthly revenue by 8x and over the last two years, we watched the team finding their market fit, scaling their business while demonstrating superior metrics on margins and capital efficiency."

Over the past year, Agrizy has established a robust proposition for  value-added agri processing (VAP) and export of processed end-products, moving beyond pure B2B trading - which has enabled the company to achieve higher margins and enhance defensibility of the business model. They are currently active in five VAP chains, including processed food, vegetables, spices, edible nuts, and extracts, fulfilling demand from well-established food brands through accredited suppliers. Additionally, Agrizy is exploring 10-11 key export markets with a combined trade volume of $7-$8 billion.

Agrizy is today working with more than 150 processors where it’s creating significant impact. When we visited their operations in Gujarat, we saw renewed optimism in the MSME processors working with Agrizy. In their words, “f Agrizy can bring us demand and tell us exactly what they want, we will keep doing the one thing we are good at  - processing and we will keep doing that all day everyday”. They have seen their capacity utilization increase, their margins improve (as previously they are selling their processed output to open market) and their receivables reaching them diligently. We also saw processors planning to expand their capacity and some actually investing in installing additional capacity, in anticipation of more demand from Agrizy

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Building a Fertile Ground for Progress

Across the globe, the agri ecosystem is rapidly embracing agritech platforms, as participants seek new market opportunities, smoother execution and better business outcomes; With this funding, Agrizy is strongly positioned to become a  leading Agritech player, creating meaningful disruption in the processor ecosystem – which encouraged us to double down our investments in the company and remain its largest investor.

“Our investment in Agrizy is a testament to our commitment to supporting ventures that align with our strategic vision. Agrizy's focus on technological innovation and sustainability while executing on its vision for transforming the agri-processor ecosystem resonates with our core values. We are excited about the opportunity to leverage our expertise and resources to support Agrizy’s growth and amplify its impact on the agriculture sector.”

We’re looking forward to the next leg of the journey with Agrizy, as  they continue to work on digitizing the fulfillment platform and enabling financing support to key stakeholders.