The first close of a second fund has been reached by NABVENTURES, the venture capital arm of NABARD, India’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development. It landed Rs 450 crore ($47M).
A green-shoe option is baked into the Rs 1,500 crore target corpus for Fund II, whose anchor investor is NABARD. Early and growth-stage businesses in agriculture and rural markets are its intended targets, with a stated emphasis on companies applying technology and scalable models to challenges across the agricultural value chain and the rural economy.
Twenty-three enterprises have drawn backing from the firm’s earlier funds. NABARD chairman Shaji Krishnan V said the fund would back visionary entrepreneurs whose solutions address critical needs across the agricultural ecosystem.
Two vehicles are already run by NABVENTURES: Fund I, and AgriSURE, which was set up with support from the agriculture ministry to finance rural startups.
Why it matters: agritech in India has found it hard to attract the cheque sizes that consumer and fintech categories command, largely because returns take longer and unit economics are harder to prove. A state-anchored fund with patience and Rs 1,500 crore of ambition is one of the more credible attempts to close that gap, and it gives founders in the sector a domestic institutional backer rather than a purely global one.
