The investment comes a few weeks after Releaf closed a $3.3 million pre-Series A oversubscribed round.

Releaf’s proprietary technology, which combines hardware and software solutions, is helping to scale Africa’s agricultural sector in a way that makes it more rewarding for farmers, food factories and consumers. 

Co-founded by CEO Ikenna Nzewi and CTO Uzoma Ayogu, Releaf is focused on building climate-adaptive supply chains to support Africa’s growing population, which is expected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050. Releaf’s supply chain technology helps Fast Moving Consumer Goods Companies (FMCGs) in Africa get high-quality inputs cheaper. 

It accomplishes this by localizing food processing technology in farming clusters to increase quality and reduce logistic costs. Releaf also finances, sources and processes crops at scale, enabling farmers to focus on farming and factories to focus on processing. The company’s novel approach helps smallholder farmers reap more value from their crops, reduces inefficiencies in the supply chain, and results in lower prices for consumers.

Releaf is currently focused on revolutionizing Nigeria’s multi-billion-dollar oil palm industry, which has more than 4 million smallholder farmers who suffer from inefficient processing systems. 

Through their proprietary data solutions, they’re able to help provide resources to farms to boost supply. Farmers who are connected to Releaf’s sourcing and logistics application tool (SALT) can provide updates about their palm nut inventory and confirm the price and volume of palm nuts available for sale.

SALT also provides farmers with training on land preparation, spacing, and planting, as well as support in sustainable land management to improve their resilience to climate change.

Releaf’s proprietary de-shelling hardware, Kraken, helps these farmers produce high-quality oil much faster and more efficiently than traditional methods such as using rocks to crack palm nuts. Kraken provides more extraction efficiency, with 27-30% more yield of higher quality oil. As a result, Releaf can produce premium oil palm products with 95% purity, which is higher than the 88% industry standard.

“Industrializing food processing throughout Africa is a major opportunity that will create significant economic and societal benefits for all parties involved, especially farmers who often struggle to make a fair living off their land,” said Ben Finlay, Plesion Capital’s Founder and Managing Partner.

“Kenna and Uzo have created exceptional technology solutions that are helping to address this pressing need by acting as a bridge between farmers and factories. We look forward to supporting Releaf’s efforts to grow its operations and eventually expand into other crops.”

Plesion Capital is currently focused on African-based investment opportunities that have the potential to address major societal challenges across the continent. Its focus areas include food insecurity, clean water access and improving infrastructure, both financial and physical. 

In January, the firm announced its inaugural investment in Uganda-based XENO Corporation, a fintech platform that helps millions in Africa to plan, save and invest for their financial goals whether they have internet access or not. Over time, Plesion Capital intends to expand into other markets globally.

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This is in terms of decentralization of raw materials for production, limited financial access, inadequate equipment and many more challenges.

Today, our spotlight shines brightly on some Agritech startups with known records of working to ensure the Agricultural sector thrives in Nigeria, with both farmers, consumers and all stakeholders benefiting from their efforts. 

Not limited to these, they include:

1. ThriveAgric

ThriveAgric is one of the interesting Agritech startups that provides finance to smallholder farmers, but doesn’t stop there. The startup provides them with the best practices needed for their businesses to scale, including access to sell to local and global markets, putting food security at the fore. How nice…

Having onboarded over 400,000 farmers, ThriveAgric has enabled the production and trading of 800,000+ grains, with more than 400,000 hectares of land cultivated. An intriguing aspect is that it has created over 9,000 jobs, helping reduce the big issue of unemployment in Nigeria.

From production to financing, processing and consumption, ThriveAgric’s got the agricultural sector.

2. Releaf

Just yesterday, Releaf raised $3.3 million pre-Series A round and this was to deepen its stand even more as one of the leading Agritech startups in its focus sector. 

Over the last few years, Releaf has built high-end technology — including Kraken — to solve the agricultural problems in Nigeria. The startup keeps finding ways to make these technologies better. 

With the pre-Series A fund raises, it seeks to launch even more products such as Kraken II, which is mobile and more affordable than the initial palm nut de-sheller, eliminating over 80% of margin-eroding costs. The startup will also launch SITE, a geospatial mapping application that discloses food processing assets.

Not limited to the above, Releaf also provides capital to farmers and food factories, helping the purchase require tools and ensure the seamless running of their day-to-day operations.

3. Agricorp

Agricorp is majorly focused on spice production and exportation, with the healthy ginger being a major. Following its success over the years, seeing a 400% capacity growth just within three years of existence, the startup expanded its focus to include poultry production, processing and distribution. 

Its semi-mechanized processing facility located in Kaduna can be used to process over 5,000MT of ginger annually. The startup provides employment opportunities to a large population from all classes and supports farmers financially and in other areas.

Its medium-scale 0.5MT/hour integrated spices processing equipment is used in the production of clean fresh ginger, dried ginger, ginger powder, dehydrated garlic powder, chilli powder, dehydrated onion powder, and lime powder.

4. Vendease

Vendease founders — Wale Oyepeju, Tunde Kara, Olumide Fayankin and Gatumi Aliyu 

Vendease is an Agritech startup that breaks barriers in the supply chain between food businesses like restaurants and farmers/manufacturers. 

How does this work? The startup leverages a technology where customers can place orders, and all possible suppliers are shown. The system assigns the order to the supplier with the best pricing and quality, with delivery within 24 hours. The good thing is that all supplies can be gotten from a single source.

Vendease will handle all your procurement without fear of disappointment and also provide analytics to help users track spends. To provide better services, it has built a series of stacks including logistics, storage, payments, inventory management, embedded finance. Users can buy now and opt to pay within 14 days.

5. Hello Tractor

Just as the name implies, Hello Tractor connects tractor owners to smallholder farmers, providing income to the owners and enabling farmers carry out related activities effectively, thereby enhancing production yield.

The startup also ensures the tracking and management of the tractor fleet remotely, with bookings managed via mobile and web applications. So there’s no fear of losing your tractor. 

Interestingly, the startup also helps users access innovative pay-as-you-go financing, helping them grow their own fleet. 

6. Farmcrowdy

Sustainability being its goal, Farmcrowdy provides the means for key players in the food value chain to maximum output and yield “untapped profits” and provides more efficient food distribution channels.

Farmcrowdy also makes life easy for farmers to an extent, providing finances needed for growth, a major issue faced in the sector.

Its tech-enabled B2B retail platform, FC Shops helps small retailers source their inventory, accessing a wide variety of FMCG goods at wholesale prices, while its FC Foods is a one-stop digital marketplace for trading raw agro-products, inputs and commodities.

7. Zowasel

Making it easy for traders to access local and international markets, as well as credit to finance, Zowasel offers easy, fast accessible technology to increase farmers’ productivity, provide quality crops and increase revenues.

The startup leverages data science and artificial intelligence to facilitate its efforts, helping smallholder farmers from seed planting stage to market reach.

In its endeavors to provide finances for farmers, Zowasel has partnered with several financial institutions including VBank and SimpliFi, and has collaborated with several organizations to facilitate affordable agricultural machinery for smallholder farmers.

8. Afrimash

Afrimash specializes in sales of agricultural products. It is a digital marketplace which helps farmers reach maximum profitability. 

The sustainability and profitability driven Agritech startup connects farmers to quality inputs and helps them build their digital identities to enable better access to financial support. It also provides access to consultants via mobile channels or online to improve productivity.

To achieve its goal, the startup has partnered with manufacturers, importers, and wholesalers of quality items to create a marketplace where they sell their products to farmers. Its secure payment systems stimulates the delivery of ordered items directly to farmers wherever they are in Nigeria.

The post Top AgriTech Startups to Watch in 2023 appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

The new funding will support the launch of two new technologies: Kraken II – a portable version of its award-winning palm nut de-sheller and SITE – a geospatial mapping application that informs the most profitable positioning of food processing assets.

The funding round was led by Samurai Incubate Africa, who re-invested after leading Releaf’s seed round, with participation from Consonance Investment Managers.

Stephen Pagliuca (Chairman of Bain Capital) and Jeff Ubben (Board member at World Wildlife Fund and Founder of Inclusive Capital Partners) also invested.

SITE was developed in collaboration with Stanford University’s Professor David Lobell, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, whose team led the refinement of the age identification process for oil palm trees in Nigeria. This analysis provided foundational yield data for the first layer of SITE.

The application leverages cutting-edge geospatial mapping tools to determine how much oil palm is planted in an area and their annual yields, alongside Releaf’s proprietary data on soil type, rainfall, farmer productivity and 3rd-party data from organizations like the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Foundation for Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta (PIND) and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) to deliver a dynamic view of farming activity.

Releaf will use this dynamic data set to train Reinforcement Learning Models in SITE that identify the most optimal positioning of supply chain infrastructure for consumer goods manufacturers, creating an effective link with Africa’s decentralized farming system.

Kraken II is a portable, lower-cost version of Releaf’s Kraken – West Africa’s most advanced palm nut de-sheller. It is just as efficient as its static predecessor, costs half as much and can attain 3x profitability because it can be transported to high density farming areas, eliminating more than 80 percent of margin-eroding logistics costs.

The combination of Kraken II’s portability and SITE’s placement and route planning capabilities enables Releaf to target the best opportunities across Nigeria’s oil palm belt rather than being limited to sourcing crops within 100 kilometers of a fixed processing site like existing food processors.

According to Uzoma Ayogu, CTO and co-founder of Releaf, “SITE and Kraken II are the next steps in our plan to fundamentally transform the efficiency of agricultural supply chains in Africa and we are excited to have partnered with an exceptional cohort of investors and collaborators to roll out these technologies. To make food supply chains profitable, we must maximize extraction yields with leading processing technology and minimize logistics costs by bringing processing capacity closer to farmers. Before Releaf, stakeholders had to choose between one or the other – large factories had great technology but were far away, leaving most farmers with rudimentary technology to process their crops. We’re now able to maximize both.”

Africa will represent 40% of the human population by the end of the 21st century and the fast-moving consumer goods market will emerge as its first globally relevant industrial sector. Releaf’s technology is designed to accelerate this industrialization while ensuring inclusive success for the planet, farmers, food factories, and consumers in one of the greatest economic opportunities globally.

Since launching in 2021, Releaf has used its supply chain technology to process more than 10 million kilograms of palm nuts and grown its monthly revenue 7X year on year.

The company has also secured more than $100 million in supply contracts from leading consumer goods manufacturers, including Presco, PZ Cussons, and more. The company’s valuation has tripled since its seed round a year ago.

Rena Yoneyama, Managing Partner at Samurai Incubate Africa, contributed, “Releaf’s success with its pilot Kraken validates its thesis, and we are excited to continue supporting their ambitious vision to create efficient supply chains within Africa’s agricultural market. They have added key members to their management team and continue to impress us with their rapid commercial growth and technological development. We look forward to more of the same success as the team rolls out Kraken II and SITE.”

Professor David Lobell from Stanford University said, “I enjoyed working with Releaf and using our tree height algorithm to establish the correlation between oil palm age and height to help farmers to get a better understanding of their future yields and make better data-driven decisions on sustainable replanting. There is a great opportunity to unlock Africa’s unique agricultural potential by leveraging remote sensing solutions, and I believe this partnership will be a catalyst.”

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Most farmers encounter challenges in scaling and growing to achieve their targets due to limitations in several aspects such as financing, accessibility, among others, and beautifully, Agritech startups are on a fast rise to tackle these challenges.

Some of these companies include Releaf, Farmcrowdy, Vendease, Zowasel, Voriancorelli, Skudu, Khula, Agrocenta, Apollo Agriculture and Complete Farmer.

1. Releaf

Releaf’s hardware and software solutions enable farmers and food factories become more efficient. Last year, the Nigeria-based agritech startup raised $2,700,000 in a seed round led by Samurai Incubate Africa, Future Africa and Consonance Investment Managers.

One of its hardware products is Kraken, used to crack nuts and crush kernels into vegetable oil which are sold to FMCG processors and local manufacturers. The company also supplied high-quality raw materials and crops with sustainability at the core of its focus.

2. Farmcrowdy

Another Nigerian agritech startup, Farmcrowdy was founded in November 2016 and has grown to become the country’s leading Agritech company that connects smallholder farmers to DFIs provided by government agencies, access to market, and processed food.

In November 2020 when it clocked four, Farmcrowdy re-invented itself by launching;

1. Farmcrowdy Structured Finance,
2. Farmcrowdy Insurance,
3. Farmcrowdy Marketing,
4. Farmcrowdy Tech and Data,
5. Farmcrowdy Foods and
6. Farmcrowdy Aggregation.

These businesses were set up to serve all individuals across the entire agriculture value chain prioritizing stakeholder access to better yields, lower costs, and smarter marketing.

Farmcrowdy is backed by Techstars, GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator, FC Agro Allied SPV, Cox Enterprises, Social Capital, and several other investors.

3. Vendease

Also based in Nigeria, Vendease raised $3,200,000 in seed funding to expand operations and scale across the continent last year. The company digitises Africa’s food supply chain, with restaurants as its primary target audience and has a transaction volume of over $13,000,000.

Backed by YCombinator, Global Founders Capital, Hack VC, Soma Capital, and others, Vendease is patronised by businesses such as Dodo Pizza, Genesis restaurant, Eden, Fishermans Daughter, to mention a few. The company allows users to manage inventories, track expenses, and access its buy-now-pay-later system, making business more seamless. 

4. Zowasel

Online sustainable marketplace for crops, Zowasel has created a peer-to-peer marketplace for farmers and buyers of agricultural produce to carry out transactions.

Based in Nigeria, the company’s platform provides quality crop testing and all-day working capital for growers and effortless crop sourcing for buyers, thereby connecting with the network of top vetted buyers to earn more for the crops.

With a total funding amount of $100,000, Zowasel is backed by Guinness Nigeria, Promasidor, MassChallenge Switzerland, SAIS, among others.

5. Voriancorelli

Voriancorelli bridges the gap between agribusinesses and the capital required for them to scale. The company offers agricultural commodities aggregation solutions to key players in the sector, such as buyers, sellers, commodity aggregators, logistics partners, financiers and food processors, by connecting them together digitally, thereby facilitating seamless transactions and ensuring the economic wellbeing of all stakeholders.

Voriancorelli is the first company that was screened for listing on the Lagos Commodities and Futures Exchange (LCFE).

6. Skudu

South Africa’s Skudu leverages technology to enhance efficiency within the agricultural value chain, ultimately benefiting all stakeholders involved via its method of merging deep farming know-how with cloud computing.

Last year, the agritech startup raised an undisclosed funding amount from one of Africa’s leading agri-food investors, AgVentures, to scale its online marketplace for agricultural inputs and produce, as well as its approaches in interpreting soil sample results, keeping track of farms and providing management tools, all targeted at enabling farmers to significantly lower input costs and protect the environment by optimising fertilizer application globally.

7. Khula

Another South African-based agritech startup, Khula connects subsistence and commercial farmers to agricultural supply and marketplaces. Last year, the company raised $1,300,000 from AECI, an SA agrochemical company and E Squared Investments.

Khula has a range of products such as the KHULA! Inputs app, Fresh Produce Marketplace and Funder Dashboard, which enables a hiccup-free process between local and international farmers, suppliers, wholesalers, retailers and other stakeholders.

8. Agrocenta

Ghana’s Agrocenta is solving the limited accessibility to markets for smallholder farmers in the rural areas, which brings about exploitation, purchase from middlemen and lack of a coordinated truck delivery system to cart commodities directly from farms to markets to sell.

Its $2,200,000 total funding amount was raised from investors such as Foreign & Commonwealth Office – UK, AV Ventures, Rabo Foundation, Shell Foundation, GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator and Seedstars.

9. Apollo Agriculture 

Based in Kenya, Apollo Agriculture helps small-scale farmers maximise profit. Via due diligence, the company builds credit profiles for these farmers leveraging a machine learning model so as to build automated digital processes that make their lives better.

Servicing over 40,000 farmers in Kenya, Apollo Agriculture has a total funding amount of $12,200,000 raised from Agri-Business Capital Fund (ABC Fund), Anthemis Group, Leaps by Bayer, Flourish Ventures, Accion Venture Lab, Mastercard Foundation Fund for Rural Prosperity, Rabobank, FMO and Musha Ventures.

10. Complete Farmer 

Ghana’s Complete Farmer is focused on food security, promoting nutritious eating, monitoring farming processes, and providing education and training to grow food precisely in order to meet industry specifications and quality. 

The end-to-end digital farming platform, which enables clients to gain competitive advantage across various agriculture value chains, raised an undisclosed funding amount from Ingressive Capital.

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