Startup Deep Dive : Vegrow — how a B2B fruit marketplace scaled revenue fivefold while losses kept widening

In FY25, Vegrow’s operating revenue climbed to about ₹554.9 crore ($57.8 million), more than five times what the company earned two years earlier. In the same window its annual net loss only widened, reaching ₹153.7 crore — the built-in tension of running a low-margin, working-capital-heavy supply chain for something as fragile and unpredictable as fruit.

Vegrow, run by Hyderabad-registered Chifu Agritech Private Limited and headquartered in Bengaluru, is trying to organise one of India’s messiest categories: the movement of mangoes, bananas, pomegranates and grapes from the farm gate to mandis, modern trade and export buyers. This deep dive traces how four IIT alumni built a B2B fruit platform, what the filings actually say about its money, and why growing the top line fivefold has not yet made the business profitable.

Quick facts

What Vegrow does

Vegrow operates a business-to-business, full-stack platform for fruits. As per Entrackr’s reading of the company’s filings, it aggregates supply from farmers, farm-gate partners, importers and vendors, then sells to a spread of channels — mandis (wholesale marketplaces), exporters, wholesalers, semi-wholesalers, modern trade and retailers — while handling the physical work in between: loading, unloading, grading, packing, storage and warehousing. It serves both domestic and international markets. On the supply side the company says it works with more than 20,000 farmers, and on the demand side it aggregates buyers across roughly 100 cities (Tracxn, as of 2026).

The origin

Vegrow was started in 2020 by four founders from IIT backgrounds who had spent real time close to farming and agri-supply chains. Praneeth Kumar, one of the co-founders, had earlier worked at ITC and spent about five years at AgroStar, where he led credit solutions and business expansion across states. His co-founders — Mrudhukar Batchu, Shobhit Jain and Kiran Naik — came from similar engineering-plus-agriculture profiles.

The founding insight was specific rather than grand: fruit is the hardest slice of fresh produce to organise. It is seasonal, highly perishable, graded by eye, and priced differently in every mandi on any given morning. A farmer who grows pomegranates has almost no visibility into where the best price sits that day, and a wholesaler in another state has no reliable way to buy consistent, graded quality at scale. Vegrow’s bet was that if it owned quality assessment, packing and logistics rather than just running a listings app, it could compress that chaos into something buyers would pay a predictable premium for.

The struggle years

Building a physical fruit supply chain is unforgiving, and the early numbers show it. In FY21 the company’s gross merchandise value (GMV) was just ₹11.8 crore, and it posted a net loss of ₹4.8 crore — a tiny operation still proving the model. The core problems it had to solve were the ones that sink most fresh-produce businesses:

• Wastage: fruit spoils fast, and every day in transit or storage eats margin. Vegrow later claimed it had cut perishable wastage to roughly a quarter of the industry average (company-stated, via Inc42), but getting there meant reworking grading and cold logistics repeatedly.
• Thin, volatile margins: commodity trading margins on fruit are wafer-thin and move with the mandi price every day, so scale had to come without the cushion of a fat take rate.
• Working-capital intensity: buying produce from farmers and holding inventory before it sells ties up cash, which is why revenue growth and losses have moved together rather than in opposite directions.

Losses widened as the company scaled deliberately: from ₹4.8 crore in FY21 to ₹29.7 crore in FY22, then to ₹114 crore in FY23 as it bought more stock and expanded logistics. This was not a near-death by failure so much as a sustained bet that owning the hard, physical middle of the chain would eventually pay off — a bet that has repeatedly demanded fresh capital to keep running.

The turning point

The clearest inflection is the FY21-to-FY23 scale-up, capped by a large late-2023 funding round. On one side of it, in FY21, Vegrow moved ₹11.8 crore of GMV. Two years later, in FY23, GMV had reached ₹361 crore — a roughly 30-fold jump in two fiscal years, as Entrackr reported. Operating revenue over the same period went from a standing start to ₹100.8 crore in FY22 and then about ₹361 crore in FY23, a 3.5x increase in a single year.

That growth is what let Vegrow close a $46 million Series C (about ₹383 crore) led by Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC on 13 December 2023. The round both validated the full-stack thesis and, through partial secondary exits, gave some early backers an off-ramp. The company simultaneously said it had reached operational profitability over the preceding year with a five-fold revenue jump — a company-stated claim that sits alongside filings still showing large bottom-line losses, a gap worth keeping in view.

The money behind it

Vegrow has raised roughly $86–87 million across its priced rounds, drawing a blue-chip investor list for an agri-supply-chain startup. The shape of the funding:

• Series A — about $13 million (2021): backed by Lightspeed and Elevation Capital, the round that funded the first real build-out (Tracxn / thekredible).
• Series B — $25 million (July 2022): led by Prosus Ventures, with existing investors participating; Vegrow was reported at about a $170 million valuation after this round (YourStory; Entrackr).
• Series C — $46 million / about ₹383 crore (13 December 2023): led by GIC, with Prosus Ventures, Matrix Partners India, Elevation Capital and Lightspeed participating; Ankur Capital, Titan Capital and Better Capital took partial secondary exits (Inc42; Entrackr).

What each backer changed: Lightspeed and Elevation gave the company early institutional credibility; Prosus (the global consumer-internet investor behind the Series B) signalled that the model could scale beyond a regional trader; and GIC’s lead on the Series C brought sovereign-fund patience suited to a capital-intensive, slow-compounding supply-chain business. The post-Series-C valuation has not been publicly disclosed and is masked on data platforms as of 2026, so the last confirmed valuation datapoint remains the ~$170 million post-Series-B figure.

How it makes money

Vegrow is, at its core, a full-stack trader rather than an asset-light listings marketplace — and that shapes both its revenue and its costs.

• Money in: the bulk of revenue is the value of fruit it buys and resells across channels (mandis, exports, modern trade, wholesalers), plus fees for services layered on top — grading, packing, storage, warehousing and logistics.
• Costs out: the dominant line is the cost of the produce itself. In FY23, purchases of stock-in-trade were ₹301.51 crore, about 62.6% of total expenses — the classic signature of a trading model where most of the “revenue” is really pass-through value of goods.
• Other big costs: transportation of ₹55 crore (up 3.3x from FY22) and employee benefits of ₹47.7 crore (up 3.5x) in FY23 (Entrackr).
• Where the margin sits: the thin spread between buy and sell prices, plus service fees, minus wastage. In FY23 the company spent about ₹1.33 for every rupee it earned (Entrackr) — the part outsiders often get wrong, assuming a marketplace take rate when the economics are really those of a low-margin, high-throughput distributor.

The numbers

Operating revenue and net loss over four fiscal years (unit: ₹ crore). FY22–FY23 figures are from Entrackr’s reading of the MCA filings; FY24–FY25 from Inc42’s financial database, also drawn from statutory filings.

Two things stand out. First, revenue growth cooled sharply from the 3.5x of FY22–FY23 to about 10.2% in FY24 (₹367.6 crore to ₹405.1 crore, per Inc42) before re-accelerating to 36.0% in FY25. Second, losses have grown in absolute terms every year even as the business scaled — from ₹29.7 crore (FY22) to ₹153.7 crore (FY25) — though estimated EBITDA loss stayed roughly flat between FY24 (₹-126.8 crore) and FY25 (₹-137.3 crore) despite much higher revenue, a sign of improving operating leverage (Inc42 estimates).

Where the money comes from

Vegrow’s revenue is spread across buyer channels rather than a single storefront, and the surprise is how little of the reported “revenue” is actually margin.

• Demand side: sales flow to mandis, exporters, wholesalers, semi-wholesalers, modern trade and retailers across roughly 100 cities (Tracxn). Export buyers matter because graded, packed fruit commands a premium abroad.
• Supply side: produce is aggregated from 20,000-plus farmers plus farm-gate partners, importers and vendors, concentrated in fruit categories such as bananas, mangoes, pomegranates and grapes (company/Entrackr).
• The surprise: because roughly 62.6% of FY23 costs were the fruit itself, the headline revenue figure overstates the economic size of the business. The number that matters is the thin trading spread net of wastage, not the ₹550-crore top line.

The risks

• Perishability and wastage: fruit spoils, and even best-in-class handling leaves a wastage tax. Any slip in cold-chain execution or a demand mismatch directly destroys margin, because unsold graded fruit cannot simply be re-shelved next week.
• Structurally thin margins and cash burn: spending about ₹1.33 per rupee earned in FY23, and posting a ₹153.7 crore net loss in FY25, means the model depends on continued external funding to grow. If capital markets tighten, growth has to slow, which in a fixed-cost logistics network can worsen unit economics.
• Working-capital and price volatility: buying and holding perishable inventory ties up cash, and mandi prices swing daily with weather, harvest gluts and export demand. A bad season for a key crop can compress the buy-sell spread the whole model rests on.
• Competition: the agri-supply-chain space includes well-funded players such as Ninjacart, DeHaat and others, and mandi commission agents remain entrenched incumbents — so pricing power on either side of the trade is limited.

The takeaway

Vegrow’s story is a clean lesson in the difference between revenue and value in a trading business. Growing the top line fivefold in two years is impressive, but when most of that “revenue” is the pass-through cost of the fruit itself, scale alone does not fix the economics — it can even magnify the cash tied up in inventory and the absolute size of the loss. The transferable point for anyone building in physical supply chains: the metric that decides whether the business works is not how much moves through the pipe, but the durable margin left after wastage, logistics and price volatility take their cut. Vegrow has proven it can move fruit at scale; the open question, on the filings so far, is whether that thin spread can widen faster than the losses.

Frequently asked questions

What is Vegrow’s legal entity name?

Vegrow is operated by Chifu Agritech Private Limited, incorporated on 26 February 2020 with CIN U52202TG2020PTC139550, registered with the Registrar of Companies, Hyderabad, and headquartered in Bengaluru.

Who founded Vegrow and when?

Vegrow was founded in 2020 by four IIT alumni: Praneeth Kumar, Mrudhukar Batchu, Shobhit Jain and Kiran Naik. Co-founder Praneeth Kumar had earlier worked at ITC and AgroStar.

How much money has Vegrow raised?

Vegrow has raised roughly $86–87 million across its rounds, including a $13 million Series A (2021), a $25 million Series B led by Prosus Ventures (July 2022) and a $46 million Series C led by GIC (December 2023).

Is Vegrow profitable?

No. It reported a net loss of ₹153.7 crore in FY25 on operating revenue of about ₹554.9 crore, per Inc42’s reading of statutory filings, although the company has claimed operational profitability on some measures.

What does Vegrow actually sell?

Vegrow runs a B2B full-stack fruit marketplace, buying graded and packed fruit from farmers and partners and selling it to mandis, exporters, wholesalers, modern trade and retailers, while handling logistics, storage and packing in between.

Sources

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

• Entrackr — “Vegrow’s GMV grew 30X in the last two fiscal years” (January 2024)
• Entrackr — “Vegrow raises $46 Mn in Series C round led by GIC” (December 2023)
• Entrackr — “Vegrow’s GMV soars over 8X to cross Rs 100 Cr in FY22” (April 2023)
• Inc42 — Vegrow financials / profit & loss and company profile (2026)
• Inc42 — “Agritech Startup Vegrow Raises $46 Mn From GIC, Others To Expand Presence” (December 2023)
• YourStory — “B2B fruits marketplace startup Vegrow raises $25M in Series B from Prosus Ventures” (July 2022)
• Tracxn — Vegrow company profile, funding rounds and team (2026)
• Tofler / ZaubaCorp — Chifu Agritech Private Limited, CIN U52202TG2020PTC139550 (accessed September 2026)

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