How agritech marketplaces lost to traditional markets

As September drew to a close, Greenikk, an agritech marketplace for bananas, drew its last breath. The four-year-old startup announced it would be shutting shop and returning capital to its investors, having failed to find product-market fit and struggling to secure fresh funding.

While Greenikk never reached the scale that some of its agritech marketplace peers such as WayCool and DeHaat have—in the year ended March 2024 (FY24), its revenue stood at a relatively paltry Rs 5.75 crore—its plight mirrors the fortunes of the wider agritech marketplace space.

Just a few years ago, marketplaces were the hottest properties in the agritech sector. During the Covid years, marketplaces—which aimed to be a bridge between the producers and buyers of agri produce and products—accounted for over half the funding that flooded into India’s agritech space. This reached a peak in 2021—which was also the best year for Indian agritech as a whole in terms of funding—when agritech marketplaces raised $490 million of the $895 million that was pumped into the space, according to startup research platform Venture Intelligence.

Since then, however, the appeal of agritech marketplaces appears to have diminished. While funding has fallen off a cliff across the board in the post-Covid era, agritech marketplaces have been especially hit, raising just $26 million in 2024.