India attracted $2.1 billion of the $4.39 billion in agtech funding tracked across 17 emerging markets between January 2023 and the third quarter of 2025. That is nearly half the total and the highest among the markets studied, according to the AgTech Investment in Emerging Markets, 2025 report released by AgBase, Briter and ISF Advisors. AgBase is a programme backed by the Gates Foundation and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO).
India’s funding was more than that of Brazil ($663.3 million), Indonesia ($453.1 million) and Kenya ($281.3 million) combined. The report places India among its “Commercial Front Runners”, alongside Brazil, Indonesia, Chile and Argentina. These are markets defined as having high commercial maturity and strong underlying conditions for agrifood investment. In India, 92% of deals had at least one commercial investor.
“India has a rare combination of large agricultural scale, strong digital infrastructure, deep entrepreneurial talent, growing pools of domestic capital, multiple exit routes and supportive government policy. That gives founders a strong foundation to take agrifood businesses from early experimentation to real scale,” said Mark Kahn, managing partner of Omnivore, an agrifood-focused venture capital firm.
According to the authors, India’s next generation of investable agrifood companies may increasingly come from biology, agricultural inputs, AI-enabled hardware, autonomous drones and robotics, rather than from digitisation alone. The report also names India, alongside parts of Latin America, as a market where deep tech and hardware businesses that need patient capital and strong research perform better, citing SAEL as an example.
The consumer end is the other opportunity. The report found retail agtech to be strong in India, where consumer demand, logistics and purchasing power align, while it is nearly absent in sub-Saharan Africa. The authors said Indian businesses can increasingly capture value downstream through food brands, processing, alternative proteins and consumer products.
The dataset covers only publicly disclosed deals, and the authors estimate it understates total capital flows by 15-25%.
Agtech’s recovery since the 2021-2023 venture correction has been slower and more uneven than that of the broader startup market, the report added. It attributed this to long sales cycles, climate and commodity risk, and the capital needs of physical infrastructure.
Source: The Financial Express
