TaniHub Group, an Indonesian startup that helps farmers get higher costs and extra prospects for his or her crops, has raised a $65.5 million Series B. The funding was led by MDI Ventures, the funding arm of Telkom Group, one in all Indonesia’s largest telecoms, with participation from Add Ventures, BRI Ventures, Flourish Ventures, Intudo Ventures, Openspace Ventures, Tenaya Capital, UOB Venture Management and Vertex Ventures.
Openspace and Intudo are returning traders from TaniHub’s $10 million Series A, introduced in May 2019. The new funding brings its whole raised to about $94 million.
Founded in 2016, TaniHub now has greater than 45,000 farmers and 350,000 patrons (together with companies and shoppers) in its community. The firm helps farmers earn extra for his or her crops by streamlining distribution channels so there are much less middlemen between farms and the eating places, grocery shops, distributors and different companies that purchase their merchandise. It does this by way of three models: TaniHub, TaniSupply and TaniFund.
TaniHub is its B2B e-commerce platform, which connects farmers on to prospects. Then orders are fulfilled by way of TaniSupply, the corporate’s logistics platform, which presently operates six warehousing and processing services the place harvests might be washed, sorted and packed inside an hour, earlier than being delivered to patrons by TaniHub’s personal couriers or third-party logistics suppliers.
Finally, TaniFund is a fintech platform that gives loans to farmers they’ll use whereas rising crops and repay by promoting by way of TaniHub. Co-founder and chief government officer Eka Pamitra advised TechCrunch its credit score scoring system is predicated on three years of efficiency, the corporate’s agriculture worth chain experience and partnerships with monetary establishments.
“More than 100 data points are considered when doing the credit risk assessment. For example, for cultivation financing products, TaniFund tailors each credit scoring based on agriculture risks and market risk of each commodity, on top of the typical borrower E-KYC scoring and process,” he defined. “Beyond credit scoring, having TaniSupply and TaniHub as a standby buyer within the ecosystem also helps to mitigate risk of each loan. TaniFund aims to further boost its credit scoring system with smarter data processing and better machine learning models.”
Pamitra mentioned TaniHub will use its new funding to construct the upstream and midstream elements of its provide chain—in different phrases, new cultivation areas, processing, packing facilities and warehouses. The firm can even increase its protection past Java and Bali to supply and promote domestically, and proceed bettering its supply-demand forecast mannequin to assist farmers plans crop cultivation and timing, with the purpose of decreasing worth fluctuations and sustaining a constant provide. Pamitra added that TaniHub can even discover precision farming know-how.
Over the final couple of years, TaniHub has began exporting a number of forms of fruits and spices to the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and South Korea. This yr, it plans to concentrate on increasing inside Indonesia as a result of the F&B (meals and beverage) market there may be price $137 billion and the Indonesian agriculture sector remains to be extremely fragmented, Pamitra mentioned.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, TaniHub says it was capable of develop its income 600% year-on-year in 2020 as demand for on-line groceries elevated.
“We postponed our branch expansion plan and focused on increasing the seven existing warehouses’ since there was a surge of demand on the B2C segment and the process of onboarding farmers. This benefited us since the adoption of purchasing fresh groceries online increased significantly, and the willingness of farmers to work with us became remarkably high because the local traditional markets were closed due to lockdowns,” Pamitra mentioned. “Since COVID-19, the eagerness of provincial governments to open communications for TaniHub to work with native farmers and SMEs in…
