TraceX Technologies, a blockchain-powered Agritech platform that enhances supply chain traceability and transparency, raises USD 1 million in pre-series A funding led by NABARD backed NABVENTURES Fund.
The round also saw participation from Paipal Ventures, an early-stage family office investment fund, and from angel investor Sunil Kumar. The newly raised capital will be used towards scaling up operations across geographies in India and in international markets, enhancing the technology platform, foraying into other value chains, and building high-performance teams across functions.
Who we are?
TraceX technologies founded in 2019 by Srivatsa Sreenivasarao and Anil Nadig, harnesses the power of blockchain technology to build clean, transparent, and traceable supply chains across the food and agriculture ecosystem.
TraceX is a next-generation digital agriculture platform that leverages blockchain to connect multiple participants across the food and Agri supply chain and help them securely exchange verifiable and auditable data leading to mutual trust, accountability, traceability, and transparency amongst the participating actors. TraceX’s SaaS platform integrates with the existing digital infrastructure in the supply chains and brings all the stakeholders onto the blockchain network, ensuring a single source of truth from farm to fork. In addition to food safety and operational efficiency, TraceX also helps companies build sustainable supply chains for the future.
What do we do?
TraceX was founded with an aim to create connected and traceable supply chains to provide accountability and transparency for every stakeholder in the supply chain. In addition to building trust among consumers, TraceX also offers a significant value add to farmers and food and agribusinesses. For farmers, it helps boost productivity, improve market linkages and enhance the quality of the produce. On the other hand, it helps food companies conform to regulatory compliances, reduce losses due to wastage, better inventory management, and timely product recalls in case of contamination.
TraceX and Traceability
A report published by Markets and Markets indicates that the food traceability market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.1% with its estimated value reaching USD 26.1 Billion by 2025. Increasing consumer awareness of safe food products, growing demand for healthy and ethically sourced products, and focus on transparency are some of the reasons behind this demand. Transparency and traceability are the two key pillars to building consumer trust.
Anil Nadig, Co-Founder, TraceX, says, “Due to the opacity in supply chains, consumers today have no way to trace and track the products they buy. Traceability in the supply-chain bridges the information and trust gap among consumers, agribusinesses, and farmers.”
Transparency builds trust and TraceX is on a mission to create credible, connected, and sustainable supply chains for the world. TraceX’s solution enables farmers, producer organizations, aggregators, food processors, insurance providers, credit providers, logistics providers, buyers, etc to exchange information with mutual trust via a permissioned blockchain digital ledger enabling each one to prove transparency, traceability, and provenance of the claims. Farmers, Processors, and Procurement folks use their multilingual mobile applications and others use web-based applications to interact with the system.
TraceX currently has a B2B SaaS subscription model where it works with companies across livestock, poultry, seafood, and Agri supply chains. The start-up currently works with 30+ food companies that include prominent names such as Olam, MTR Foods, Slay Coffee, Govt of Telangana, GoDesi, BlueTokai, Sam Agri, Milk Mantra, and many others.
Commenting on the future of food traceability, Dr. G. R. Chintala, Chairman of NABARD and NABVENTURES, says, “Traceability is the future of Indian agriculture. Leveraging technology to showcase transparency will allow farmers and FPOs to command a premium for their produce. Traceability solutions empower farmers to follow sustainable climate-resilient practices ensuring continuous productivity.”
The Funding and what it means to TraceX
NABVENTURES
NABVENTURES is backed by National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), the apex development finance institution of India with an AUM of USD 95 billion. NABVENTURES is a venture growth equity fund that invests in food, agritech, and rural fintech. The fund has invested in 9 startups: Jai Kisan (2 rounds), Unnati (2 rounds), TenderCuts (2 rounds), Eggoz, VilCart, KrishiTantra, Satyukt, TraceX and Fraazo(exited).
Apart from providing patient capital, NABVENTURES focuses on operational value additions and leverages the NABARD network and subsidiaries to provide market access, debt, and strategic advice to its portfolio companies.
Speaking about the investment, Rajesh Ranjan, CEO, NABVENTURES, says, “A typical agri-food supply chain is unorganized, and the data is stored in silos. This results in a disconnected supply chain, limited interoperability, and compromised transparency across transactions. Given the increasing demand for providing credibility to claims made by brands on sustainable sourcing, food handling, and other aspects, TraceX is the right platform-neutral, independent, and credible solution for building traceable supply chains from farm to fork. It organizes the entire supply chain by providing connected, secured, auditable and verifiable information via blockchain.”
Commenting on the fundraise, Anil Nadig, Co-Founder, TraceX, says, “We are on a mission to create credible, connected, and sustainable supply chains for the world. We are thrilled to have NABVENTURES join us in our journey. Their tremendous experience in the field of food and agriculture will help us accelerate our vision of building a globally connected food network on blockchain.”
The funding will be used to grow the team to scale the agricultural landscape across geographies and invest further into enhancing the technology platform and foraying into other value chains. This opportunity would help TraceX to transform the food and agriculture sector and build a reach with as broad an audience as possible.
TraceX aims to work towards further enhancing the product by leveraging Asset Tokenization (NFTs), AI, ML, and IoT to provide digital empowerment to all the participants in the supply chain. Over the next few months, TraceX plans to extend its offerings to encompass carbon offsets and climate action goals of companies, driving a safe and sustainable future.
Commenting on the company’s future plans, Srivatsa Sreenivasarao, CEO and Co-founder, says, “We have received an overwhelming response from our customers for the kind of positive impact our product has created. Our aim is to harness the power of Web3 technologies to build a large distributed autonomous supply chain network for food and agriculture businesses.”
The Way ahead
The favorable impact of the initiatives in the agritech space is expected to peg the market valuation at $30-35 billion by 2025.
Gartner expects digital business initiatives such as experiential end-consumer experience and optimization of the supply chain to push spending on enterprise applications and infrastructure software into double-digit growth in 2023
Blockchain technology adaption in Agriculture represents 6.5% of the entire world’s economic production employing nearly 40-45% of the total global workforce and its total worldwide production is around about 5 trillion dollars.
This is just the beginning and excited given this opportunity, TraceX should foresee massive growth opportunities disrupting the Agritech sector. A significant step towards creating a globally connected sustainable food network, built on ethos, trust, and transparency.
