Cold Chain Startup New Leaf Raises INR 6.15 Cr Pre-Series A Funding

New Delhi based cold chain solutions provider enterprise New Leaf Dynamic Technologies raised INR 6.15 Crore in equity funding in its Pre-Series A Round from ex-Founder of Facebook and Founder of Asana, Dustin Moskovitz, a US-based entrepreneur-turned-investor. The investment is made by Moskovitz’s firm Good Ventures LLC – a for-profit investment organization that donates all of its earnings to the Good Ventures Foundation.

Additionally, New Leaf Technologies raised seed funding and incubation support from Social Alpha and Indigram Labs Foundation. Previously, they have also received a grant of USD 50,000 from Villgro, CEEW and Ikea Foundation, alongside a grant of USD 100,000 and technical assistance from Water Energy for Food (WE4F) South and Southeast Asia.

New Leaf Technologies aims to increase and strengthen its product portfolio in the near future and make its existing product offering – a biomass-powered refrigeration unit GreenCHILL™ available to a greater number of channel partners working towards fortifying India’s rural cold chain.  GreenCHILL™ is a carbon-neutral technology that saves 40 Tons of GHG 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.

Initially, New Leaf Technologies started out with the vision to provide access to affordable refrigeration facilities across India. New Leaf’s refrigeration technology efficiently utilizes biomass and farm waste to facilitate the increase of income for micro-enterprises by prolonging the shelf life of perishable produce. 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 — reducing sales cycle time and ownership cost for the end-users.

 Besides strengthening existing operations, New Leaf Technologies will be engaging in hand-holding support at the ground level to the farmers to help them build storage infrastructure at or near the farm gates or aggregation points. As of today, New Leaf claims to be  supporting around 15,000 farmers, and post-fundraise, they aspire to be positively impacting the livelihoods and income of more than 2 lakh small and marginal farmers over the next 3 years. New Leaf plans to do so by filling multiple gaps in the cold chain across all major touchpoints across various segments.

New Leaf Dynamic Technologies 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. Being a part of the Powering Livelihoods programme has enabled New Leaf to reach and deliver a strong value proposition to its target customers and end-users.

Ananth Aravamudan, Sector Lead, Climate Action at Villgro, representing the Powering Livelihoods program, says, “An important objective of our program is to enable our incubatee 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.