What we closed and when
In late 2025, we closed an angel round from a group of regional agri-tech and agri-finance investors with direct experience in Indonesian agricultural markets. We are not disclosing the individual investors by name at their request, but the group includes people who have built and operated in the input supply, commodity trading, and rural fintech spaces in this region. That background matters more to us than the amount, which is a common statement from startups but in this case reflects a real constraint: we need investors who understand that West Java smallholder agriculture has its own logic, and that trying to apply Southeast Asian consumer tech metrics to a rural commodity business is how you build the wrong thing fast.
The round was closed in December 2025. We are writing this in January 2026, a few weeks into the new year, because we wanted to use the funds for a full planting cycle before saying much publicly about what we planned to do with them.
Three things we are building next
The first priority is regency coverage. We are currently active in Subang and Karawang, with partial coverage in Cianjur. The Priangan highland regencies, specifically Garut, Tasikmalaya, and Ciamis, have different agroclimatic profiles than our current coverage area, and expanding into them requires recalibrating the soil model, the variety recommendation set, and the buyer network. We plan to open at least two new regencies during the 2026 planting calendar.
The second priority is the soil model itself. The current version uses a static soil-class map derived from provincial survey data. That data is accurate enough to be useful, but it was collected over a long period and does not account for management-driven soil degradation in plots that have been intensively double-cropped for fifteen or more years. We are working on incorporating satellite-based organic matter proxies to add a dynamic layer to the soil classification, which would let us flag plots whose current state has diverged significantly from the surveyed baseline.
The third priority is the Mitra dealer network. We have 42 Mitra dealer partners as of the end of 2025. The angel capital gives us the capacity to onboard a larger cohort, improve the Mitra dashboard based on feedback from the first year of the program, and add demand forecasting tools that help dealers plan their input orders three to four weeks ahead of the planting window rather than reacting to last-minute farmer requests.
Why we chose this round over alternatives
We had conversations with three other potential investors during the second half of 2025. Two of them would have provided more capital than we ultimately took. We did not close with them for reasons that are worth being direct about.
The first had a portfolio weighted toward B2C consumer apps and was evaluating us with a user acquisition framework that did not translate to our context. Smallholder farmer onboarding in West Java does not follow a digital funnel. It follows trust accumulation through field presence, through extension relationships, through Mitra dealer introductions. We could not honestly commit to a quarterly active user growth curve on a consumer app timeline, and we were not willing to pretend we could.
The second would have required us to expand to Sumatra within eighteen months as a condition of the investment. We understand the strategic logic of that position, but Sumatra's dominant crops, including rubber and oil palm smallholder plots, require a different agronomic model than the rice and horticulture focus we have built for West Java. Diluting our model across two crop types and two regional soil regimes before the West Java version is fully validated would be a risk we are not ready to take.
What we are not saying
We are not saying this round means Elevarm is proven or that the model scales to a large farmer base. We have pilot data from one planting season across a modest cohort. We have a functional platform but one that still needs significant calibration work. We have dealer partnerships that are promising but early.
Angel capital is the right stage for the work we are doing now: refining the core model, expanding regency coverage methodically, and building the farmer and dealer trust that a larger platform will require. We are not sizing the next twelve months as a growth story. We are sizing them as a validation story, and the capital we closed is appropriate for that scope.
The team is Bagus, Ravi, Dewi, and Andi, plus three agronomy extension staff we brought on from the West Java extension program network. We are still small and intend to stay small enough that every product decision traces back to a specific farmer's actual experience in a field. If you are farming in West Java or running an input dealership and want to talk about what we are building, write to us at [email protected].