Agritech Startup Beleaf Reportedly Receives Additional Funding from Norinchukin

Startups agritech Beleaf reportedly received additional funding for their series A round. According to data reported to the regulator, as quoted by Alternative.pe, a bank from Japan, namely Norinchukin, stepped in to provide additional funds of $1 million or around Rp. 15,5 billion.

Previously, in mid-2023, beleaf announced the acquisition of series A funding of $6,85 million or more than IDR 103 billion led by Alpha JWC Ventures. This round continues the initial stage of funding that was successfully achieved at the end of 2022. Also participating in this round were new investors Openspace Ventures and several angel investors.

Focusing on Farming as a Service (FaaS) services, Beleaf invites farmer partners to implement modern agricultural systems such as the hydroponic concept. To its partners, Beleaf provides support in the form of high quality seeds, planting guidance, IoT technology, and harvest sales services. Quoting data on the website, currently there are 97 FaaS partners with a total land area of ​​12 hectares.

For end consumers and businesses, Beleaf Farms provides fresh food products such as green vegetables, fruit, and even home vegetable growing packages. Beleaf products are also distributed via a number of platforms such as Sayurbox, Astro, GrabMart, to supermarkets such as Hypermart, HERO, Papaya, SuperIndo, and so on.

The beginning of Beleaf

Beleaf was founded in 2019 by Amrit Lakhiani. They started the business as a premium hydroponic brand offering various types of vegetables and fruit. As the business grew and experienced managing their own farms, the company began to expand its products into technology-enabled farm management.

Beleaf launched the Farming as a Service program in 2022, involving farmers in Puncak and Bandung with technology-enabled agricultural management. FaaS is already quickly solving some of the sector's pressing challenges. Even though it is an agricultural country, Indonesia's potential is still not optimized and its dependence on imported agricultural products is still high.

Amrit admitted that his party realized that instead of building more farms themselves, they had something that could be applied more widely and more powerfully. Powered by big data and IoT, Beleaf solutions offering services end-to-end  starting from operations, distribution, and offtaking – connecting farms, distributors and retailers in one integrated ecosystem. This allows farmers to increase their productivity, quality and profitability.

The current focus of the business is to control and increase partner farm yields by up to 15%. Their platform monitors weather, seeding, planting activity, nutrient dosing, farm planning and harvesting. All data collected from this process will then power its machine learning for the continuous improvement of agriculture, as well as research and development of future agribusiness solutions.