According to a McKinsey and Co. study, sub-Saharan Africa has the potential to increase its agricultural output and overall contribution to the economy, but the sector remains unexplored due to lack of access to quality farm inputs. The economy derives 23% of its GDP from agriculture, with 60% of its population involved in small-scale farming.
There are critical gaps in the region's agri-food space and that's why the Farmerline has stepped in to deliver technologies that are intended to increase farmers. Its solutions are designed to support a quick access to markets by farmers for better incomes and a reduction of post-harvest loss and waste.
Pre-Series A funding was over $12 million.
The company Farmerline was founded in 2013 by Alloysius Attah andEmmanuel Owosu Addai. It is ready for a rapid take-off with plans to reach 300,000 farmers in 2022, a 400% increase in growth compared to last year. The company will start its expansion in Ghana before moving to the neighboring country of the Ivory Coast.
The equity round was led by Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund and the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank. The Netri Foundation and DEG were among the debt funders.
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The agtech will use its first equity funding to build physical infrastructure.
We think of ourselves as the Amazon of farmers, powered by a digital and physical infrastructure that allows the movement of goods and services to and from rural areas.
We plan to use the funding to strengthen our infrastructure, that is warehouses and distribution channels. A network of partners that can help us quickly move inputs likefertilizer and seeds to rural areas and farm produce from rural areas is important to what we do. He said that they don't intend to bring all of the storage in-house, but that they want to be more efficient and work with the right partners.
Quality farm inputs and education are delivered by Farmerline. The image is from Farmerline.
Greater reach.
Farmers get access to high-quality supplies when Farmerline works with agribusinesses. The first point of knowledge for the farmers is usually the shop owners, who are used by Farmerline to distribute educational material and to gather farmers together for training. The partnering shops use the startup's Mergdata platform, which is an artificial intelligence platform for supply chain intelligence, to digitize the farmers they serve, and to generate the data the agritech needs to predict the demand of farm supplies.
Attiah said that they are tapping into a network of trust that the shop owners have with farmers to help them expand.
Farmerline realized that working directly with the farmers would amount to competition with local businesses, so they decided to partner with retailers. He said the cost of going door to door was high.
Working with the agribusinesses made our businesses grow and helped us make more impact during the Pandemic when we couldn't travel. We sent the trucks full of seeds andfertilizer to the farmers. That model worked well.
Farmerline can tell the performance of their partnering agribusinesses using Mergdata, and develop a credit scoring program that guides the extension of business expansion loans.
Last year, the startup more than doubled its direct-reach to 79,000 farmers, up from 36,000 in 2020 and 8,000 in 2019.
Through third party licensing for Mergdata, the agtech has digitized over 1 million farmers in 26 countries. The platform is used as a national market information system in West Africa.
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