The AgTech Investment in Emerging Markets 2025 report, released by AgBase, Briter and ISF Advisors, based on more than $4.39 billion in funding between 2023 and the third quarter of 2025, places India alongside Brazil, Indonesia, Chile and Argentina in its ‘commercial front runners’ segment. These are markets characterised by high commercial maturity and strong underlying enablers for agrifood investment. India alone accounted for $2.1 billion of the funding tracked during the period, the highest among the 17 markets studied.

The report finds that South Asia is the only region studied with a diverse and repeatable set of agrifood exit routes, spanning corporate acquisitions, private equity transactions, startup acquisitions and public listings.

Exits occur across on-farm, off-farm and retail segments, suggesting that multiple types of agrifood businesses can reach scale and generate liquidity for investors.

According to the report, South Asia is unique among the emerging market regions studied in having public listings as part of its agrifood exit landscape; an indicator of institutional depth and capital markets capable of absorbing agrifood companies.

The report identifies Ag BioTech as a category whose investment potential is strongly influenced by commercial agricultural markets, buyers and routes to scale. While Latin America currently has stronger commercial routes to scale and exit for biologicals, South and Southeast Asia are seeing growing commercial interest alongside continued early-risk capital.

For India, this suggests that the next generation of investable agrifood companies may increasingly emerge from biology, agricultural inputs, AI-enabled hardware, autonomous drones, robotics and other technologies that address the physical and scientific foundations of food production, rather than from digitisation alone.

Quoting Mark Kahn, Managing Partner of Omnivore, a media statement said: “Emerging markets have an enormous opportunity to build the next generation of agrifood companies, but what works in one market doesn’t necessarily work in another. India has a rare combination of large agricultural scale, strong digital infrastructure, deep entrepreneurial talent, growing pools of domestic capital, multiple exit routes and supportive government policy. That gives founders a strong foundation to take agrifood businesses from early experimentation to real scale.”

As agrifood moves from the boom-and-bust cycle of the past decade towards more disciplined, commercially grounded growth, India’s combination of domestic capital, agricultural markets, digital infrastructure, diverse business models and multiple exit pathways gives it a distinctive position among emerging markets. The next phase of opportunity, however, is likely to be broader than digital agriculture, extending from deep-tech to finance and value chain infrastructure to consumer food businesses, the statement said.

Published on September 22, 2026