Dodla Dairy, based in Hyderabad, is a 22 year-old company that works with 250,000 smallholder farmers across 7,000 southern Indian villages, many of them surviving on the brink of poverty.
The Rise Fund’s first investment in the food and agriculture sector comes a week after its first impact deal, a $120 million investment in edtech company EverFi (see, “TPG’s Rise Fund comes out of the gates with a big edtech investment in EverFi”).
Dodla provides the farmers with access to a growing segment of India’s food and agriculture market, as well as access to financing and farming services and inputs to help them invest in their own production.
“India has more dairy farmers than any other country, and is the world’s largest and fastest‐growing producer of milk,” said Bill McGlashan, TPG Growth founder and CEO of The Rise Fund. “Investments that facilitate stronger and more efficient market links in this food value chain can help to significantly reduce rural poverty.”
TPG Growth is seeking to raise as much as $2 billion for the Rise Fund, which counts Jeff Skoll and U2 frontman Bono as co-founders (see “Billionaire’s Ball: A look at TPG’s $2 billion Rise Fund”).