CropIn gives 70x returns to early employees, investors in share buyback

Bengaluru based agritech startup CropIn has announced the close of a $4.3 million (about Rs 32 crore) secondary share sale where early employees and investors realised nearly 70X returns.

The announcement follows a $33 million (Rs 245 crore) Series C fundraise by the company, including $20 million in primary capital from ABC World Asia, an impact investment firm backed by Temasek.

“Nearly 60% of our employees hold stock options in the company. As a growing company we will be looking for other opportunities to expand our stock programs to provide this as an additional benefit for our employees and enable them to participate more actively in the growth journey of the organization,” Krishna Kumar, CEO of CropIn, said in a statement issued by the company.

The business-to-business agritech SaaS company was founded in 2010 by Krishna Kumar, Kunal Prasad and Chittaranjan Jena. The company works with farming companies, seed producers and other organisations through their SmartFarm product to manage production, forecast, predict risk and other compliances. The company’s AI and data platform SmartRisk product caters to banks underwriting loans, insurance companies and similar players.

Read: CropIn founder on chasing 3X growth, deep tech investments post latest funding round  

CropIn joins a club of startups which have seen ESOP buyback events this year. Over the last month, logistics technology company Locus, B2B commerce platform Moglix, edtech firm upGrad and enterprise software firm Whatfix have all announced ESOp buyback programmes.  

Edtech unicorn Unacademy announced ESOPs for 300 educators on its platform while Ola expanded its ESOP pools ahead of a proposed IPO.