Startup Deep Dive : AgNext Technologies — revenue crashed 85% in a year, yet the funding kept coming

In FY24, AgNext Technologies booked ₹205.7 crore in revenue, as per company financials tracked by Inc42. A year later, for the year ended 31 March 2025, that number was ₹31.1 crore — a fall of 84.9% year-on-year, according to the same filings-based tracker, corroborated independently by data platform TheKredible.

The strange part is what happened around that collapse. Novo Holdings, the Denmark-based life-sciences investor, led a strategic investment into AgNext in June 2024. Less than a year later, in April 2025, The Hashgraph Group came in alongside Novo Holdings. A Mohali-based agri-food-quality startup that spent a decade going from a founder’s insight at a grain market to a platform used by banks and food conglomerates was simultaneously losing most of its revenue and still attracting fresh institutional capital. This is the story of how AgNext built a spectral-science business, why its numbers swung so hard, and what that says about the quality-assessment business it is actually in.

Quick facts

What they do

AgNext builds and sells an AI-driven quality-assessment platform, branded Qualix, that uses spectral science, computer vision and IoT sensors to grade agricultural and food commodities — grains, pulses, oilseeds, spices, tea, milk and animal feed — in place of slower manual and wet-lab testing. Its customers, as listed on the company’s own site, span agribusinesses and food processors (Godrej, ITC, Adani Wilmar), tea estates (Goodricke, Rossell Tea, Harrisons Malayalam), national procurement bodies (NAFED), banks and NBFCs that need quality due diligence before lending against stored commodities (HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak), food regulators (FSSAI) and institutional caterers (Compass Group India). The company describes its reach as more than 2,000 locations served globally and over 1,000 across India, spanning offices in Mohali, Noida and Mumbai plus international presence in the UAE and Switzerland.

The origin

Taranjeet Singh Bhamra studied agricultural engineering at IIT Kharagpur, where his dissertation dealt with crop-nutrient modelling and molecular food analysis, before spending three years in grassroots agriculture and commodity procurement and then earning an MBA from IIM Calcutta, according to an account he gave to Modern Manufacturing India. The founding memory he traces the company to is specific: in early 2004, at a mandi in Shahjahanpur, Uttar Pradesh, he watched a middleman reject a farmer’s produce without any real assessment, forcing the farmer’s family to wait six days before accepting a fraction of what the produce was worth. As Bhamra put it, “no technology existed to accurately ascertain the value of their produce and a family’s livelihood was being determined on very dubious grounds.” He had no way to act on that observation for over a decade. AgNext was incorporated only at the end of 2016, in Chandigarh, and was incubated at IIT-Kharagpur’s a-IDEA agribusiness incubator, which gave the young company access to researchers in computer vision and molecular analysis.

The struggle years

The gap between the insight and the company is itself the first setback worth naming: twelve years passed between the 2004 mandi visit and AgNext’s September 2016 incorporation, a delay Bhamra has attributed to simply not having the resources to build anything at the time. The second stretch was slower than a typical software build: AgNext spent roughly four years as a deep-tech company before its flagship product had a paying market. Qualix, the platform the whole business is now built around, went commercial only in 2020, four years after incorporation, according to AgFunderNews’ account of the company’s own telling — a long runway of hardware and algorithm development before the first structured pilot-to-paid conversions.

A third, more recent, setback shows up directly in the company’s regulatory filings rather than in a founder’s retelling. Corporate-data platform Tofler, drawing on filings for the year ended 31 March 2024, records that AgNext’s total revenue fell 47.8% that year — the first hard evidence, filed with the Registrar of Companies, that the growth story was already cracking a year before the much larger drop that followed.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after in AgNext’s public record sits across two consecutive filed years. In FY24, the company reported revenue of ₹205.7 crore, per Inc42’s tracking of its financials. In FY25, that fell to ₹31.1 crore, a drop of 84.9%, with a net loss of roughly ₹22.1 crore on total expenses of about ₹52.8 crore, again per Inc42 — figures independently reflected in TheKredible’s tracking of the same filings. That is not a single bad quarter; on Tofler’s numbers it is the second straight year of decline, following the 47.8% fall already recorded for FY24 itself. What makes the moment a genuine turning point rather than a simple decline is what else was happening in parallel: Novo Holdings led a strategic investment into AgNext that closed in June 2024, inside the same window as the sharper of the two revenue drops, and The Hashgraph Group followed with another strategic investment in April 2025, after the FY25 numbers would have been substantially known internally. AgNext’s institutional backers kept underwriting the company through the exact period its top line was shrinking by double-digit, then near-90%, percentages.

The money behind it

• 2016 (grant): Early prize money and grant support tied to a-IDEA, NAARM’s agribusiness incubator, around the company’s founding — amount undisclosed.
• 2017–2019 (seed and pre-Series A): Seed backing led by Omnivore, followed by Kalaari Capital, plus angel investor Samir Kumar — disclosed amounts vary across aggregators (Tracxn, Clay) and are not confirmed by a primary release, so no figure is stated here.
• August 2021 (Series A): $21 million led by Alpha Wave Incubation (backed by DisruptAD, managed by Falcon Edge Capital), with existing investors Omnivore and Kalaari Capital participating. AgFunderNews, FoodTechBiz and NextBillion each reported this as, in FoodTechBiz’s words, “the largest Series A financing in Agri-Tech” for an Indian agritech startup at the time. The round included a secondary component that gave early backer a-IDEA NAARM a 5x return on its initial investment, per AgFunderNews.
• December 2022 (grant): Support from The Hashgraph Association, reported by funding tracker Clay at up to $250,000, undisclosed by the company itself.
• June 2024 (strategic investment): Led by Novo Holdings; amount not disclosed in the companies’ joint announcement carried by PR Newswire. Novo’s Dr Amit Kakar called it “an exciting opportunity to collaborate with AgNext’s management team in markets with unmet needs,” while Bhamra said the funding would help AgNext “scale its product sales internationally and into new food segments.”
• April 2025 (strategic investment): The Hashgraph Group invested alongside continuing backer Novo Holdings; amount undisclosed by the company.
• Total raised: Aggregators Tracxn and Clay put cumulative disclosed and undisclosed-estimated funding at roughly $33–34 million (about ₹317–326 crore) across seven rounds since 2016 — a tracker-level estimate, not a company-confirmed figure.
• Valuation: AgNext has not published a valuation for any of its 2021–2025 rounds. Aggregator estimates in this range vary and are not corroborated by two independent primary sources, so this piece does not state one.

How it makes money

• Money in: AgNext sells access to its Qualix platform — a combination of portable spectral-analysis hardware, cloud software and quality algorithms — to agribusinesses, processors, procurement agencies, banks/NBFCs and regulators, per the company’s own description of its offering.
• Product breadth: The company states it runs 10+ rapid testing technologies and 200+ food-quality algorithms across 100+ commodities, company-stated figures from agnext.com not independently audited.
• Costs out: The cost base is dominated by hardware and instrument development, algorithm and data-science R&D, cloud infrastructure, and a distributed field network needed to service testing points across “2,000+ locations,” per the company’s site — a heavier fixed-cost model than a pure software business.
• Where the margin sits: On FY25 filings tracked by Inc42, total expenses of about ₹52.8 crore against revenue of ₹31.1 crore imply the company was spending roughly ₹1.70 for every rupee of revenue that year — a structurally loss-making position at the current revenue base.
• The part people get wrong: Because AgNext ships physical spectral devices, it is easy to mistake it for a hardware-instrument maker selling one-time boxes. Its client list — banks and NBFCs doing collateral due diligence, food regulators doing surveillance, defence and paramilitary procurement — points instead to a data-and-assurance business, where the hardware is the sensor layer for a recurring quality-verification service, not the product itself.

The numbers

Figures below are for AgNext Technologies Private Limited, in ₹ crore, as tracked from company filings by Inc42 and (for the FY24 percentage decline) Tofler; ₹387.7 crore converts to roughly $40.4 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Revenue fell roughly 92% between FY23 and FY25 across the two years of filings reviewed here, from ₹387.7 crore to ₹31.1 crore.
• FY25 total expenses were about ₹52.8 crore against ₹31.1 crore of revenue, per Inc42’s tracking.
• No FY22 or earlier standalone revenue/profit figures were found in the sources reviewed for this piece; they are not stated here rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

• Geography: AgNext is headquartered in Mohali, Punjab, with additional India offices in Noida and Mumbai, plus international offices in the UAE and Switzerland, per the company’s website. It states a footprint of 2,000+ locations served globally, including 1,000+ across India.
• Financial services: Banks and NBFCs — named clients include HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Kotak — use the platform for quality due diligence on commodities pledged as collateral, per agnext.com.
• Food and agri-processing: Conglomerates and processors including Godrej, ITC and Adani Wilmar, plus tea producers Goodricke, Rossell Tea and Harrisons Malayalam, are named customers on the company’s site.
• Public and institutional procurement: National procurement agency NAFED and food regulator FSSAI are listed customer categories, alongside defence and paramilitary procurement and unspecified “global food programs.”
• The surprise: the single largest identifiable customer categories by name are financial institutions and government-linked procurement bodies rather than consumer-facing food brands — a quality-assurance business selling as much to lenders and regulators as to the food industry itself.

The risks

• Revenue concentration and volatility: A swing from ₹387.7 crore (FY23) to ₹205.7 crore (FY24) to ₹31.1 crore (FY25) — a roughly 92% cumulative fall — is the pattern of a business whose revenue depends on a small number of large, lumpy contracts (government procurement cycles, large processor deals) rather than broad-based recurring subscriptions. A single large contract not renewing can move the topline by tens of percentage points, as the filings themselves show.
• Competitive intensity: Tracxn ranks AgNext against 47 tracked active competitors in its category, spanning both instrument makers offering near-infrared and spectral testing hardware and pure-software quality-analytics players — a crowded field for a company still working out its recurring-revenue model.
• Continued dependence on external capital while loss-making: With FY25 expenses of about ₹52.8 crore against revenue of ₹31.1 crore, and two strategic rounds (Novo Holdings, June 2024; The Hashgraph Group, April 2025) closing in the same window as the revenue decline, AgNext’s near-term operations rely on continued investor support rather than internally generated cash.

The takeaway

The lesson in AgNext’s public numbers is not about spectral science or agri-tech specifically. It is that investor conviction and revenue durability can move in opposite directions for a stretch, and a company can look validated — new strategic backers, marquee client logos, patents, awards dating back to 2019 and 2020 — while its filed revenue is falling by double digits, then by nearly 85%, in consecutive years. Marquee names on a website (banks, conglomerates, regulators) prove product credibility; they do not by themselves prove that revenue is diversified enough to survive one or two of those relationships changing terms. For any quality-infrastructure or B2B deep-tech business selling into a small number of large institutional buyers, the filed revenue line — not the logo wall or the funding announcement — is the number worth checking first.

Frequently asked questions

What does AgNext Technologies do?

AgNext builds an AI and spectral-science platform, Qualix, that assesses the quality of food and agricultural commodities such as grains, tea, milk and spices, selling to agribusinesses, food processors, banks and NBFCs, regulators and procurement agencies, per the company’s own description of its business.

Who founded AgNext and when?

AgNext Technologies Private Limited was incorporated on 15 September 2016 in Mohali, Punjab, per Tofler’s record of its MCA filing. Its CEO and founder is Taranjeet Singh Bhamra, an IIT Kharagpur and IIM Calcutta graduate; Sparsh Kaur is listed alongside him as a company director.

How much funding has AgNext raised?

AgNext’s confirmed rounds include a $21 million Series A in August 2021 led by Alpha Wave Incubation, plus strategic investments from Novo Holdings (June 2024) and The Hashgraph Group (April 2025) at undisclosed amounts. Aggregators Tracxn and Clay put total funding since 2016 at roughly $33-34 million across seven rounds, a tracker estimate rather than a company-confirmed total.

Why did AgNext’s revenue fall sharply in FY25?

Company filings tracked by Inc42 and Tofler show revenue falling from ₹387.7 crore in FY23 to ₹205.7 crore in FY24 (down 47.8%) and to ₹31.1 crore in FY25 (down a further 84.9%). The filings reviewed for this piece do not disclose the specific cause of the decline, so none is asserted here.

Is AgNext Technologies listed on a stock exchange?

No. AgNext is a privately held company with no public listing, and it has not disclosed a valuation for its most recent funding rounds.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Tracxn, AgNext company profile and funding-and-investors pages, accessed September 2026
• Tofler, AgNext Technologies Private Limited company filing summary (CIN U72900PB2016PTC045727), accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “AgNext Financials” company financial tracker, accessed September 2026
• TheKredible, AgNext financials page, accessed September 2026
• Clay, AgNext Technologies funding dossier, accessed September 2026
• PR Newswire, “Novo Holdings announces investment in AgNext Technologies,” 25 June 2024
• AgFunderNews, “India’s AgNext banks $21m Series A funding, delivers 5x return for exiting investor,” August 2021
• FoodTechBiz, “AgNext raises US $21 million in the largest Series A financing in Agri-Tech,” August 2021
• NextBillion, “AgNext Technologies lands $21 million led by Alpha Wave Incubation,” August 2021
• Modern Manufacturing India, “Back to the Roots,” founder interview/profile
• FoodInfoTech, “AgNext – An ICT Revolution That Can Shake Up The World Of Farming”
• AgNext Technologies company website (agnext.com), products, customers and geography pages, accessed September 2026

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