Startup Deep Dive : AgroStar — the farm-input reseller that markets itself as an AI platform

AgroStar calls itself India’s largest digital farmer network. Yet strip away the app, the advisory hotline and the talk of artificial intelligence for crop diagnosis, and 97% of its money still comes from something as old as agriculture itself: selling farmers seed, fertiliser and pesticide (Entrackr, March 2026). In FY25 the Pune-based agritech crossed ₹853 crore ($89 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) in revenue and still lost ₹143.5 crore doing it.

That contradiction — a technology company whose balance sheet reads like a commodities trader’s — sits at the centre of AgroStar’s thirteen-year story. Two brothers who had never farmed a field built a business betting that India’s 100 million-odd farmers would trust a phone call over the local dealer. They were nearly wrong more than once, they gave up nearly a tenth of the company’s equity round after round to stay funded, and they still have not turned a profit. What they built instead is one of the few Indian agritech companies that has survived long enough for its numbers to be checked.

Quick facts

What they do

AgroStar sells Indian farmers the things they need to grow a crop — seed, crop-nutrition products and crop-protection chemicals such as pesticides and fungicides — through an app, a toll-free advisory line and a network of franchised retail stores called Saathi outlets. Alongside the input business it runs a farm-output arm, INI Farms, which buys fresh produce such as pomegranates and bananas from a network of growers and exports it under the Kimaye brand to retail chains abroad. The company describes the combination as helping farmers on both ends of the transaction: what they spend to grow a crop, and what they earn selling it (corporate.agrostar.in, accessed September 2026).

The origin

Shardul Sheth spent eight years away from Indian agriculture before he built a company around it. After a stint with PwC’s consulting practice in Mumbai and an MBA from the Rochester Institute of Technology, he worked at Best Buy in the United States, watching an organised retailer sell electronics to price-sensitive customers at scale. His brother Sitanshu had taken the more conventional route, working on business consulting and due-diligence assignments at KPMG India. Neither had a farming background, but both had watched how badly served rural India was by the fragmented network of local agri-input dealers who doubled as the farmer’s only source of both products and advice, often with a financial incentive to push whichever brand paid the highest margin (YourStory, April 2022).

The insight that became AgroStar was simple: separate the advice from the sale. Give a farmer a phone number he can call for an honest recommendation, and a way to get the product delivered without haggling at the counter. The brothers started in 2013 with about ₹10 lakh of their own capital and a toll-free, missed-call ordering line run out of a 100-square-foot office, with an explicit long-term ambition of reaching 25 million Indian farmers (YourStory, April 2022). It was, on paper, a call centre with a delivery van attached to it. Everything that followed was an attempt to turn that into a platform.

The struggle years

The idea was easier to describe than to run. In the earliest years, before AgroStar had built a call-centre team, Shardul and Sitanshu Sheth answered the missed calls themselves, working as their own customer-service agents because there was no one else to do it and no revenue yet to pay for hired help; by 2013 both brothers had run through their personal savings funding the pilot (YourStory, April 2022). That is a founder-reported account rather than an audited one, but it is consistent with the scale of the company they were running: a two-person operation trying to reach farmers across an entire state on a missed-call number.

A second, better-documented setback arrived seven years later. When India’s COVID-19 lockdown began in March 2020, the kharif sowing season was approaching in Rajasthan and Haryana — exactly when farmers needed to buy seed and fertiliser. Instead, AgroStar found itself running at about 50% of total capacity, with farmer demand for agricultural inputs down 20% within two weeks, as growers avoided leaving their homes and local authorities restricted movement. Shardul Sheth spent the two weeks of the strictest lockdown lobbying state governments for permission to resume operations in Maharashtra and Rajasthan (Forbes India, 22 April 2020).

The financial cost of scaling through that period shows up plainly in the company’s own filings. Losses did not shrink as the company grew; they widened. Net loss rose 89% to ₹141.7 crore in FY22 from ₹74.8 crore in FY21, even as revenue nearly doubled over the same stretch (Inc42, 20 May 2023; Entrackr, May 2023). A company built to make farming cheaper for its customers was, for years, spending faster than it earned to get there.

• 2010–2013: bootstrapped missed-call model, founders working as their own call-centre agents, personal savings exhausted before the business found paying scale (YourStory, April 2022).
• March–April 2020: COVID-19 lockdown cuts input demand 20% and capacity to roughly 50% during peak kharif sowing season (Forbes India, 22 April 2020).
• FY21 to FY22: net loss jumps 89% to ₹141.7 crore from ₹74.8 crore, even as the company kept raising fresh capital to fund growth (Inc42, 20 May 2023).

The turning point

The moment that changed what kind of company AgroStar was came in March 2022, when it acquired Mumbai-based INI Farms, then one of India’s largest exporters of fruit and vegetables, in a deal structured as a mix of cash and stock with the value undisclosed. INI Farms exported produce such as pomegranates and bananas under its Kimaye brand to retail chains across some 35 countries at the time of the deal (YourStory, March 2022; Agrospectrum India, 31 March 2022; Fruitnet, March 2022). Until then, AgroStar had only ever taken money from farmers, selling them inputs. The acquisition flipped the model: for the first time, the company could also pay farmers for what they grew and route it into export markets, capturing a second slice of the value chain instead of just the first.

The numbers on either side of that year tell the story of a company scaling through the deal rather than despite it. In FY21, before the acquisition closed, AgroStar’s operating revenue stood at ₹138 crore. By FY22, the year INI Farms was folded in, revenue had grown 88.4% to ₹260 crore (Entrackr, May 2023). Losses grew alongside it — the deal did not fix profitability, and was never claimed to — but it gave AgroStar a second growth engine and, eventually, a route into overseas retail shelves that a pure agri-input reseller could never have built on its own.

The money behind it

AgroStar has raised a total of $218.2 million across nine funding rounds as of its most recent close in November 2025 (Inc42, accessed September 2026). The shape of that capital stack:

• Series A, 2013: $3.7 million, the company’s first institutional capital (Inc42/funding trackers, cited by texau.com compilation of press reports).
• Series B, 7 March 2017: $10 million led by Accel India, with Aavishkaar and IDG Ventures India participating — Accel’s entry made it the company’s anchor institutional backer for the next decade (YourStory, March 2017; Inc42, March 2017).
• Series C, March 2019: $27 million led by Bertelsmann India Investments, with existing investors joining (Entrackr, March 2019; Inc42, March 2019).
• Series D, December 2021: $70 million led by Evolvence, Schroders Capital and Hero Enterprise, with the UK’s development finance institution CDC (now British International Investment) and existing backers Aavishkaar Capital, Accel, Bertelsmann and Chiratae Ventures also participating — this brought Schroders Capital in as a lead investor for the first time (YourStory, December 2021; Global AgInvesting, December 2021).
• April 2023 tranche: $40 million, with Schroders Capital contributing $25 million and Schroder UK Public Private Trust adding $8 million alongside Accel, Chiratae, Evolvence, Aavishkaar, Bertelsmann, Hero Enterprise, British International Investment and IFC (QuotedData, 6 April 2023).
• Series E5, November 2025: $30 million (about ₹265 crore) led by climate-focused investor Just Climate, AgroStar’s first dedicated climate investor, with Aavishkaar, Accel, Bertelsmann, Evolvence, Chiratae Ventures and Hero Enterprises also contributing (Entrackr, November 2025; Entrackr, December 2025).

Three backers explain most of the shape of the cap table today. Accel came in earliest, at Series B in 2017, and stayed through every subsequent round, giving AgroStar credibility with later-stage global investors. Aavishkaar Capital, an impact-focused investor with a mandate around financial inclusion and rural livelihoods, has been in the company since Series B and gave the story a development-finance credibility that pure venture money would not have. Schroders Capital arrived at Series D in December 2021 and became the largest single shareholder, at 14.75% as of the November 2025 round — a sign that AgroStar’s cap table has shifted from Indian and early-stage venture money toward global asset managers as it has aged (Entrackr, December 2025). The price of all that capital: founders Shardul and Sitanshu Sheth together hold roughly 7.8% of the company they started, down from significantly higher stakes in earlier rounds (Entrackr, December 2025).

How it makes money

AgroStar’s business model is closer to an organised retailer than a software company, even though the app and advisory layer are what get it called an agritech.

• Money in — product sales: the company sources and sells branded and private-label seed, fertiliser and crop-protection chemicals — a portfolio the company describes as 200-plus products — to farmers directly through its app or through the Saathi retail network of more than 10,000 partner stores (Entrackr, November 2025; corporate.agrostar.in, accessed September 2026).
• Money in — export commerce: INI Farms buys fresh produce from aggregated grower networks and sells it under the Kimaye brand to international retail chains, a second and separate revenue line layered onto the core input business (YourStory, March 2022).
• Money in — services and advisory: a smaller stream from paid advisory, agronomy consultations and facilitation of third-party loans and insurance for farmers, which the company uses chiefly to keep farmers engaged with the platform rather than as a standalone profit centre (Entrackr, March 2026).
• Money out — cost of materials: the single largest cost line, at ₹567 crore in FY25, or 56% of total expenses, reflecting the fact that AgroStar physically buys and resells input products rather than earning a pure commission (Entrackr, March 2026).
• Money out — logistics: transportation costs rose 31% to ₹145.5 crore in FY25, a reminder that shipping bagged agricultural inputs to rural retail points and doorsteps is expensive relative to the ticket size of each order (Entrackr, March 2026).
• The part people get wrong: AgroStar is marketed and covered in the press as a farm-advisory and AI platform, but advisory and services generated only about ₹13 crore of FY25’s ₹864 crore in total income — under 2%. The technology layer functions mainly as customer acquisition and retention for a physical-goods trading business, not as the revenue engine itself (Entrackr, March 2026).

The numbers

Figures below are operating revenue and net loss as reported in AgroStar’s Registrar of Companies filings, compiled by Entrackr and Inc42. FY23 standalone figures were not independently reported by trackers at the time of writing and are omitted rather than estimated.

• Revenue grew roughly 6.2x between FY21 and FY25, from ₹138 crore to ₹853 crore (Entrackr, May 2023 and March 2026).
• The loss-to-revenue ratio improved sharply in the most recent year: AgroStar spent ₹1.18 to generate every ₹1 of revenue in FY25, down from ₹1.46 in FY24 (Entrackr, March 2026).
• FY25 EBITDA margin stood at -7.15% and return on capital employed at -140.48%, both signs that the business, while narrowing its losses, has not yet reached operating break-even (Entrackr, March 2026).
• Cash and bank balances stood at ₹120 crore against current assets of ₹437 crore at FY25 year-end (Entrackr, March 2026).

Where the money comes from

AgroStar’s revenue splits two ways: by product line, and by geography.

• By product line (FY25): product sales — physical agri-inputs — contributed ₹827 crore, or 97% of operating revenue, up 14.5% year-on-year; services income added ₹13 crore and other operating income a further ₹13 crore (Entrackr, March 2026).
• By geography, agri-inputs: the core input business remains concentrated in western and central India — Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh were the states named at Series D in December 2021 — with a 2024 acquisition of ULink Agritech (from which the parent entity AgroStar operates today takes its registered name) used to push into the northern wheat and paddy belt, including Uttar Pradesh and Haryana (YourStory, December 2021; QuotedData, April 2023).
• By geography, exports: the INI Farms/Kimaye export business reached retail chains in about 35 countries around the time of its 2022 acquisition; the company’s own site now cites over 25 countries and more than 100,000 tonnes of fruit and vegetables processed annually (Fruitnet, March 2022; corporate.agrostar.in, accessed September 2026).
• The surprise: a company that positions itself around AI-driven advisory and a 12-million-farmer digital network earns almost none of its revenue from that layer directly. The advisory and technology stack functions as a retention and cross-sell tool for a commodity-trading business, not a fee-generating product in its own right (Entrackr, March 2026).

The risks

• Unit economics still negative at scale: a -140.48% ROCE and -7.15% EBITDA margin in FY25 show that even after a 6x revenue increase since FY21, the core business has not demonstrated it can turn a profit on the capital already invested in it; cost of materials (56% of expenses) and transportation (up 31% year-on-year) scale with volume in a way that revenue growth has not yet outpaced (Entrackr, March 2026).
• Founder and control dilution: nine rounds of fundraising have reduced Shardul and Sitanshu Sheth’s combined stake to about 7.8%, while Schroders Capital (14.75%), Chiratae Ventures (12.01%) and Accel (10.36%) each individually hold larger blocks than the founders do together — a cap-table structure that leaves strategic decisions increasingly dependent on institutional investor alignment (Entrackr, December 2025).
• Revenue concentration in a single product category: with 97% of operating revenue tied to physical agri-input sales — a category exposed to monsoon variability, crop-price cycles and input-price competition from India’s large unorganised retail dealer network — a weak agricultural season or a pricing squeeze from offline competitors would hit AgroStar’s topline directly, with limited diversification from its smaller services and export lines to cushion it (Entrackr, March 2026).

The takeaway

AgroStar’s story is a useful corrective to how Indian agritech gets pitched. The company is routinely described, including by itself, as a technology and advisory platform for farmers — and it is genuinely that, with an app, a call centre and 12 million-plus farmers reached, according to its own figures. But the numbers say something more specific: for thirteen years, the actual business of AgroStar has been buying and reselling physical goods to a price-sensitive, seasonal customer base, at a scale where even a 6x jump in revenue has not yet produced a profit. The lesson is not that the advisory layer is worthless — it is what built the farmer relationships and the distribution reach that make the input business possible. It is that a technology story and a trading business can be the same company, and the trading business is the one that has to work for the technology story to mean anything.

Frequently asked questions

What does AgroStar actually sell?

Primarily physical agricultural inputs — seed, crop-nutrition products and crop-protection chemicals such as pesticides — sold to farmers through its app, a toll-free advisory line and a network of more than 10,000 Saathi partner retail stores. A second business, INI Farms, buys fresh produce from farmers and exports it abroad under the Kimaye brand (corporate.agrostar.in, accessed September 2026; YourStory, March 2022).

Who founded AgroStar and when?

Brothers Shardul Sheth and Sitanshu Sheth founded the company in 2013 in Mumbai, later moving its base to Pune, starting with a toll-free missed-call ordering line and about ₹10 lakh of personal capital (YourStory, April 2022).

How much funding has AgroStar raised, and who are its investors?

AgroStar has raised $218.2 million across nine rounds as of November 2025, according to Inc42. Its investors include Accel, Aavishkaar Capital, Bertelsmann India Investments, Schroders Capital, Chiratae Ventures, Evolvence, Hero Enterprise, British International Investment and, most recently, Just Climate (Inc42, accessed September 2026; Entrackr, November 2025).

Is AgroStar profitable?

No. It posted a net loss of ₹143.5 crore in FY25, though that was a 56% improvement on its ₹327 crore loss in FY24, on revenue of ₹853 crore. Its FY25 EBITDA margin was -7.15% (Entrackr, March 2026).

What is AgroStar worth today?

Its most recent funding round, closed in tranches between April and November 2025 and led by Just Climate, valued it at a post-money figure Entrackr put at about ₹2,190 crore (roughly $228–250 million depending on the exchange rate used), broadly flat compared with the Series E round it had initiated back in May 2022. An earlier April 2025 tranche of the same round was separately reported at closer to $293 million (Entrackr, December 2025; Indian Startup Times, April 2025).

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Agrostar spends Rs 405 Cr to make Rs 260 Cr in FY22,” May 2023.
• Inc42, “Agritech Startup Agrostar’s FY22 Loss Surges 89% To INR 142 Cr,” 20 May 2023.
• Entrackr, “Agrostar valuation remains flat in Series E; founders stake slips to 8%,” December 2025.
• Entrackr, “AgroStar raises $30 Mn led by Just Climate,” November 2025.
• Entrackr, “AgroStar crosses Rs 850 Cr revenue in FY25; cuts losses,” March 2026.
• Inc42, “AgroStar — Funding, Revenue & Investors” (company profile), accessed September 2026.
• Indian Startup Times, “AgroStar Secures $6.7M in Fresh Funding from Existing Backers, Valued at $293M,” April 2025.
• YourStory, “Pune-based AgroStar raises Series B funding of $10M,” March 2017.
• Inc42, “Pune Based Agritech Startup AgroStar Bags $10 Mn From Accel India, Others,” March 2017.
• Entrackr, “Bertelsmann India leads $27 Mn Series C round in AgroStar,” March 2019.
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] AgroStar raises $70M Series D investment,” December 2021.
• Global AgInvesting, “India’s AgroStar Closes on $70M Series D,” December 2021.
• QuotedData, “Schroder UK Public Private backs Indian AgTech start-up,” 6 April 2023.
• YourStory, “AgroStar marks entry into global food supply chain with INI Farms’ acquisition,” March 2022.
• Agrospectrum India, “AgroStar acquires largest exporters of F&V crops INI Farms,” 31 March 2022.
• Fruitnet, “AgroStar acquires INI Farms,” March 2022.
• Forbes India, “Lockdown: How Agritech Ventures Are Trying To Fix The Food Supply Chain,” 22 April 2020.
• YourStory, “With an end-to-end agri ecommerce platform, AgroStar is empowering farmers,” April 2022.
• AgroStar corporate website, corporate.agrostar.in, accessed September 2026.

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