Aspada, a venture firm with a record in food-system investments, put $2.7 million into Chennai-based Waycool, a fresh-produce distributor that connects smallholder farmers to markets in and around Chennai.
Inefficiencies in the market between farms and customers depress farmer incomes and lead to as much as 30 percent of produce being wasted, says Aspada’s CFO Kushal Agrawal.
The investment in Waycool will allow the distributor to expand to two new cities — Bangalore and Hyderabad — improve its infrastructure and build a technology platform to support its supply chain.
