Indian rural tech startup Hesa says it has raised $2 million as part of a seed funding round which was led by Venture Catalysts.
Founded in 2019, Hesa allows local brands and businesses to come together as a community. It was awarded one of the top five positions in the Innopreneurs Startup Contest this year, which comprised more than 1000 companies from five nations.
Hesa also provides a technology-led platform that enables businesses to reach, showcase, demonstrate and transact with their customer base across rural and remote areas of the country.
The platform enables marketing and service-based income from rural activities and promotions for village-level entrepreneurs. Importantly, the platform is open to other companies, so it can enable a new culture of microbusinesses to develop in rural India.
In addition, it helps in the placement of contract workers in the countryside. Many rural laborers in India don’t have access to a centralized jobs market, so finding constant work is a challenge.
The company was launched in April 2020. Hesa claims to have accumulated total revenue of $4 million to date, and has seen an average monthly growth of 15% and a retention rate of 65%.
The startup has connected 65 brands with 600,000 rural customers through a network of 8000 village-level entrepreneurs, covering around 5000 Indian villages so far.
Vamsi Udayagiri, Hesa’s founder and chief executive officer said Hesa is looking forward to all Indian villages being supported by the innovative product.
Vamsi previously commented,
“It is redefining rural commerce by providing last mile physical and digital connect to rural areas…Our primary objective is to enable brands to reach the last mile customers in remote Bharat phygitally.”
Meanwhile, this company is making efforts towards the realization of our vision to become the largest integrated market in rural India allowing trade easily and livelihood generation on a large scale.
With the participation of millions of small business people in rural India, Hesa may be the next major connecting force in Indian agriculture.
