Rural cold chain solutions provider New Leaf Dynamic Technologies raised ₹6.15 crore in equity funding in its Pre-Series A Round from Dustin Moskovitz, a US-based entrepreneur-turned-investor. The investment is made by Moskovitz’s firm Good Ventures LLC.
Akash Agarwal, Co-Founder, New Leaf Dynamic Technologies said the capital raised through this round will be utilised majorly to strengthen cold chain infrastructure, reducing post-harvest losses by replacing conventional compressor technologies with the biomass-powered refrigeration technology GreenCHILL, developed by the company, which is affordable, sustainable and reliable.
GreenCHILL is a carbon-neutral technology that saves 40 tonnes of green house gas emissions per year, equivalent to the carbon footprint of up to 20 petrol cars and advocates the use of natural refrigerants which have global warming reduction potential in alignment with the SDG7.
New Leaf’s refrigeration technology efficiently utilises biomass and farm waste to facilitate the increase of income for micro-enterprises by prolonging the shelf life of perishable produce.
“We have been doubling our growth since the last two years, and now bolstered by the fundraising, we look forward to quadrupling our growth by the end of the current fiscal,” Agarwal said in a statement.
Recently, New Leaf tweaked its business model to provide access to finance to its end-users—farmers and farmer-producer companies—by providing loan guarantees through various banks and financial partner institutions on behalf of the farmers and, thus, reducing sales cycle time and ownership cost for the end-users.
New Leaf has raised seed funding and incubation support from Social Alpha and Indigram Labs Foundation. Previously, it had also received a grant of $50,000 from Villgro, CEEW and Ikea Foundation, alongside a grant of $100,000 and technical assistance from Water Energy for Food (WE4F) South and Southeast Asia.
New Leaf said it will be helping farmers build storage infrastructure at or near the farm gates or aggregation points. Presently, New Leaf is supporting around 15,000 farmers, and post-fundraise, they aspire to be positively impacting the livelihoods and income of more than two lakh small and marginal farmers over the next three years. New Leaf plans to do so by filling multiple gaps in the cold chain across all major touchpoints across various segments.
New Leaf is one of the several enterprises being supported by Powering Livelihoods – an initiative jointly run by CEEW and Villgro Innovations Foundation, that aims to transform India’s rural economy through the penetration of clean-energy powered livelihood solutions.
Ananth Aravamudan, Sector Lead, Climate Action at Villgro, representing the Powering Livelihoods program, said “An important objective of our program is to enable the companies to become funding-ready. We help them strengthen regulatory compliance, scale operational processes and meet downstream funders. We are very happy to see New Leaf benefiting from our program and raising their next round of funding.” The programme is also helping them to focus on building an ecosystem for the farmer producer companies to adopt cold rooms at farm gates for reducing post-harvest losses. With the constant support and guidance from the Powering Livelihoods team, New Leaf Technologies has successfully transitioned from a technology supplier to providing access to finance, storage advisory and market linkages to farmer producer companies.
