MUMBAI: Innoterra, earlier known as Pioneering Ventures, is looking to substantially scale up its India agri business, having brought its various venture investments under one platform, said senior executives of the firm.
“Over the past five years, our venture portfolio has grown quite significantly under the venture incubation model. And with our businesses covering most of the main food categories and value chains, what obviously started to happen is that we had overlaps in the value chains, on the sourcing side and also on the commercial end,” said Pablo Erat, co-founder and deputy CEO of Innoterra.
“But due to the shareholding structure where shareholders were investing directly into the specific SPVs that of course was increasingly becoming a suboptimal setting because we were not really able to fully capitalize and profit from the synergies that started to emerge. And we were not free in allocating our resources strategically in the best possible way.”
“In addition to that we had strongly started to ramp up our data and tech capabilities. One big step was the acquisition of Lateral Praxis that now has been fully integrated into our organization and the technology and the data, as a foundation, started bringing together the value chains and unlocking a lot of potential synergies,” said Erat.
“This led the firm, in 2019, to a conclusion that the much more intelligent structure going into the future would be to bring together all of our ventures empowered by technology and data under one company, basically a platform company, which is Innoterra.”
Over the past five years, Inoterra has invested around $60 million in its various businesses in India so far.
“Around 50% of the investment amount was conducted last year to prepare the foundation for accelerated profitable growth under the Innoterra platform company,” said Erat.
The Innoterra platform comprises businesses such as MilkLane, Desai AgriFoods, Samaaru, Farmlink and Lateral Praxis.
With its various businesses now under one platform, Innoterra plans to implement various strategic initiatives to ease both supply and demand side issues for the farmers and retailers it works with.
“…We provide access to more affordable financing. So there we are implementing a high tech and high touch solution on a large scale. We are working on providing access, through digital means to markets at speed. And also, we are running a pilot post-harvest harvest services for the farmers. What we are also doing is to build an educational platform or a training platform, a knowledge sharing platform for the farmers, to provide access to know-how,” said Erat.
Today, Innoterra works with around 60,000 farmers and 16,000 retailers.
“Over the past 5 years, we have grown with a CAGR of over 100%. Growth last year was solid but lower at around 50% due to impacts of global epidemic. We expect to significantly accelerate growth again this year,” said Erat.
“In course of this year, I would expect to have over a hundred thousand farmers on the platform. And the next four years, I would be surprised if we are not in the millions already.”
