Helicrofter, an agri-marketplace, is acquired by DeHaat

With the acquisition of Helicrofter, a Maharashtra-based B2B agri-input marketplace business, DeHaat has completed its third acquisition in a row. According to DeHaat's co-founder and CEO Shashank Kumar, the integration of Helicrofter's company would include more than 2,000 agri-input shops and 30 sellers across Maharashtra, bringing DeHaat's geographical coverage to another major Indian agricultural belt. DeHaat was last valued at $450 million in October 2021, following a $115 million financing.

DeHaat supports over 700,000 farmers in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan, with a full-stack technical infrastructure at its core. Helicrofter's accession to the roster is in keeping with DeHaat's goal of global expansion, as it represents the company's first foray into Maharashtra.

Helicrofter is a farm input e-commerce platform founded by Siddhartha Choudhary in 2020 with the goal of eliminating supply chain inefficiencies in the rural ecosystem. Despite the epidemic, Helicrofter has been profitable since the first month of operation and has an annual income of more than Rs 50 crore. Siddhartha was previously the CEO of DestaGlobal, a farm input e-commerce firm, where he was instrumental in developing the whole IT stack for input market linkage and driving revenue. He began his career at Monsanto as a Product Manager for the cotton and vegetable businesses.

"At DeHaat, we have built a crop and service agnostic, farmer-first model. Owing to our full-stack approach, we have been generating amazing responses from all our new, as well as existing geographies. We have been consistent with 35-40 per cent growth in our network on a month-on-month basis, and this acquisition will cement our footprint into Maharashtra and thereby the Western part of India, which forms a major agri cluster for the nation. Over the years, DeHaat's micro-entrepreneur network has grown to 4,000 in Eastern and Central parts of India. With the addition of Helicrofter's network, we will now add a wide range of prospective micro-entrepreneurs from Western India to this list," Amrendra Singh, co-founder – DeHaat, said.

DeHaat gives farmers access to over 3,200 agricultural inputs, as well as AI-based personalised pest and disease control advice given via mobile app and call centres. Over 600 commodity bulk buyers, including retail chains, e-commerce firms, FMCG giants, and SME food processors, are directly supplied by the platform, which aggregates over 30 crops from farmers on its network. DeHaat has added financial services to its list of services in the last six months. DeHaat closed its latest round of fundraising in October 2021, led by Sofina and Lightrock, and backed by some of the industry's largest names, including Prosus Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, RTP Global, FMO, and Omnivore.

"We, at Helicrofter, are delighted to be joining hands with DeHaat. This union will undoubtedly help us add more value to the farmers and other stakeholders by strengthening our offerings, and accessing the wide variety and quality of services, as well as network access, that DeHaat possesses. What makes this partnership even more ideal for us is the complementing ideologies and synergy of function that will enable us to work together in materialising our vision for the farmer communities that we jointly serve. I am happy that all employees of Helicrofter are settling in well and are eager to scale DeHaat to newer heights," Siddhartha Choudhary, Founder, Helicrofter said.