Moroccan agritech Yola Fresh shuts down, raising questions about fresh-food e-commerce

Moroccan agritech Yola Fresh has ceased operations after failing to secure additional financing, despite raising USD 7 million in 2024 and showing strong commercial demand.

Founded in 2023, Yola Fresh developed a digital solution connecting fruit and vegetable producers with retailers, aiming to improve market access, reduce intermediaries and minimise food waste. In 2024, the company reported serving more than 1,000 retailers and distributing around 1,200 tonnes of produce monthly. At the time, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) reported that Yola Fresh had helped cut food losses from 40% to just 6%.

Yola Fresh is not an isolated case. Kenya’s Twiga Foods, which attracted over USD 160 million in investment, entered administration in August 2026. India’s Otipy also ceased operations in 2025, despite reporting strong revenue growth and serving over one million customers at its peak.

Why it matters: The financial sustainability of digital fresh-food distribution remains an open question. Even asset-light models face substantial logistics costs, while operational improvements and growing revenues do not necessarily translate into profitability. As businesses grow, higher transaction volumes can also increase working-capital pressures. The challenge is not simply to connect more farmers and retailers, but to develop business models in which growth strengthens the underlying economics of agricultural distribution.

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29/09/26

Farm to Feed secures €150,000 from Proparco to reduce food losses

French development finance institution Proparco has invested EUR 150,000 in Kenyan agritech Farm to Feed to expand its digital agricultural distribution platform, improve farmers’ access to markets and reduce food losses.

Founded in 2021, Farm to Feed operates a digital platform that forecasts and matches demand with supply, communicates requirements to farmers, and coordinates sourcing, logistics, warehousing and payments. By combining these services with rapid payments, the company aims to create a more predictable route to market for farmers. It also develops markets for surplus and imperfect produce, including through processing activities that extend shelf life.

Photo credit: Proparco

Farm to Feed reports working with 5,500 registered farmers and more than 160 B2B customers (hotels, schools, hospitals, food processors and institutional feeding programmes), with annual growth exceeding 100% for three consecutive years. According to its 2025 impact report, farmers working with the company experienced a 249% increase in income and an 81% reduction in food losses.

Why it matters: Farm to Feed goes beyond matching farmers with buyers by creating commercial opportunities for produce that might otherwise go to waste. But as other fresh-food distribution stories in this edition show, the challenge is whether the additional value generated through these activities can outweigh the costs of collecting, processing and distributing the produce.

12/10/26

IFC backs Ghana’s Complete Farmer to expand its end-to-end digital agriculture platform

Ghanaian agritech Complete Farmer has secured a USD 2.4 million convertible loan from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) to expand input financing and agronomic services for smallholder farmers. IFC will also provide USD 480,000 in advisory support to strengthen the company’s digital solutions and partnerships with financial institutions.

Complete Farmer operates an end-to-end digital agriculture platform connecting farmers with inputs, financing, agronomic services and markets. Its CF Grower app supports farmers with production planning, access to inputs, farm monitoring and connections to buyers.

Image credit: Complete Farmer

The company also operates CF Buyer, which helps commercial buyers source agricultural produce, and CF Storefront, a marketplace for agri inputs and services. These digital solutions are supported by field agents and physical fulfilment centres.

Complete Farmer reports a network of more than 72,000 farmers in Ghana and aims to reach 240,000 by 2030.

Why it matters: Complete Farmer's approach addresses several constraints simultaneously, connecting farmers with inputs, financing, agronomic support and markets. This integration could strengthen commercial relationships across the value chain, while the IFC investment should help the company expand input financing and test whether the model can work at a larger scale.

01/10/26

Kenya’s Rhea raises USD 100,000 to expand soil intelligence technology into Tanzania

Kenyan agritech Rhea has secured USD 100,000 in convertible financing from Obudu Capital to commercialise its soil-testing technology and expand into Tanzania.

Founded in 2022, Rhea specialises in soil-health management. Its AgriPad portable testing device combines sensors, software and machine learning to generate field-level soil data and fertiliser recommendations. Rhea delivers soil-testing services through local agronomists and agrodealers, who use AgriPad to test farmers’ soils and earn commissions on each test. Farmers pay for the service, while agents lease the devices from Rhea. The company also provides soil fertility mapping, laboratory and pathogen analysis, and agronomic advisory services.

Photo credit: Sweat Africa, Rhea

Rhea reports having reached over 100,000 farmers through its activities. In the first half of 2026, the company recruited and trained 135 agronomist agents across three Kenyan counties and introduced a mobile app to support their work. The new funding will help deploy 100 AgriPad devices, with the aim of reaching another 5,000 farmers and expanding into Tanzania.

Why it matters: Soil intelligence is gaining traction in digital agriculture, as we’ve seen with Tanzania’s MazaoHub and India’s AgroNxt. Rhea’s approach could make soil testing and AI-based recommendations more accessible through local agronomists and agrodealers. The question is whether the commercial model can keep testing affordable for farmers while providing sufficient incentives for the agents delivering the service.

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12/10/26

ADB Ventures invests in Georgia’s TelAgri to expand AI-powered agricultural finance

ADB Ventures, the venture capital arm of the Asian Development Bank, has made an early-stage equity investment of an undisclosed amount in Georgian agritech and fintech startup TelAgri. This marks its first investment in Georgia and Central Asia.

Based in Tbilisi, TelAgri combines satellite imagery, AI and agronomic expertise to help banks assess farm-level risks, monitor agricultural loan portfolios and identify potential repayment problems. The company already works with financial institutions and public-sector partners across the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The investment will support product development, expansion into new emerging markets and stronger partnerships with banks and governments.

Why it matters: Interesting to see ADB Ventures expanding its investment focus into the Caucasus and Central Asia, following ADB’s Annual Meeting in Georgia in 2024. Around 80% of Georgian farms are smaller than one hectare, with an average holding size of 1.4 hectares. This fragmentation makes agricultural credit assessment costly, particularly for small loans. TelAgri’s use of satellite imagery and AI could help lenders assess risks more efficiently and improve access to agricultural finance.

08/10/26

East Africa Foods raises USD 40 million to expand agrifood supply-chain infrastructure

Continuing this edition’s focus on how digital technology is being used to connect farmers with markets, Tanzania-based agrifood company East Africa Foods has secured approximately USD 40 million to expand its physical and digital supply-chain infrastructure. The financing includes USD 26 million in Series B equity led by PIDG’s InfraCo, alongside Oikocredit and FMO, as well as additional investment and debt financing.

East Africa Foods sources produce from more than 28,000 registered smallholders and supplies over 10,000 urban retailers. Its operations combine aggregation, storage, processing and distribution with digital systems connecting farmers, branches and retailers. The investment will support expansion into new markets, additional logistics capacity and further development of its digital platform, with the aim of reaching 100,000 smallholder farmers.

Why it matters: For large agrifood distributors, greater digitalisation, if well executed, can reduce coordination costs, improve inventory management and make last-mile distribution more efficient. What’s interesting about East Africa Foods is that digital technology is being integrated into a much larger investment in physical infrastructure. In other words, digital innovation is becoming an integral part of agribusiness modernisation, rather than a separate area of innovation.

Highly localised, accurate weather information is crucial in tropical regions with high climate variability and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns. One study across six African countries found that, in a typical year, around a third of farms were affected by extreme weather events, reducing national crop production by an average of 29%.

Two recent developments show how quickly AI-powered weather intelligence is advancing: the OpenAI Foundation is backing a USD 60 million initiative targeting weather and crop-disease forecasting for 100 million farmers, while Google Deep Mind, the main AI R&D lab of Google, has released a new version of its WeatherNext AI forecasting technology with forecasts at resolutions of up to 5 km.

But what does AI actually change for weather intelligence? AI can help address some of the structural weaknesses that have made accurate, localised weather intelligence particularly difficult in LMICs. I see three areas where it could make a particularly important difference.

1. Doing more with sparse observational data

Ground-truth observations are a fundamental ingredient of weather forecasting, but many African and other LMIC markets have much thinner networks of functioning ground weather stations. This creates something of a paradox: some of the places where accurate weather intelligence matters most are also those where weather is highly variable and the underlying observational infrastructure is weakest.

Photo credit: Flickr

AI cannot eliminate this data gap, but it can help make much better use of the data that are available, combining satellite observations, weather-station data and other sources in new ways. Google DeepMind’s WeatherNext 3, for example, directly ingests live satellite imagery, allowing it to generate a new forecast every hour. It also trains directly on sparse weather-station observations, helping it produce more localised predictions even where observational networks are limited. This is particularly important in parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific that have historically lacked access to high-resolution forecasting because of the cost of traditional regional models.

Another emerging opportunity is synthetic data: artificially generated data that can supplement limited real-world observations when training AI models. Used carefully, synthetic data could help address gaps in datasets where observations are expensive, geographically uneven or simply unavailable. Weather intelligence company Ignitia, for example, has used synthetic data to help train its AI models in regions where observational data are sparse. It cannot substitute for real observations, particularly where models need to be validated against highly variable local conditions, but it could become another tool for building useful models in data-scarce environments.

Ground observations remain critical, particularly in highly variable tropical climates, for validating whether increasingly sophisticated models actually work in local conditions. For this reason, investment in observational infrastructure should remain a priority. Initiatives such as the Systematic Observations Financing Facility (SOFF), a UN fund supporting countries to expand and sustain weather and climate observation networks, have an important role to play. Better AI models and better observational infrastructure need to develop in parallel.

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2. Producing much more granular forecasts, at much lower computational cost

The second opportunity is granularity. High resolution is the key word, but historically it has come at a cost. AI dramatically reduces the computational requirements of sophisticated forecasting. Earlier Google DeepMind models could generate global forecasts in under a minute on a single specialised processor, compared with hours of computation on hundreds of machines for traditional physics-based models. This matters particularly in emerging markets, where the supercomputing costs of running high-resolution regional models have historically limited the availability of localised forecasting.

There is a related, broader lesson here for AI in Africa. Much of the global AI race has been associated with ever-larger models, datasets and computing requirements. But in environments where both data and computing resources are constrained, smaller and more specialised models can offer another route. The work around African language AI offers an interesting parallel: Lelapa AI, for example, has developed smaller language models for African languages, while initiatives such as Masakhane are building models and datasets for languages poorly represented in mainstream AI systems. Rather than simply replicating the scale of global models, the opportunity is to design AI around the data, infrastructure and problems that exist locally.

WeatherNext 3 can now forecast some surface variables at resolutions of up to 5 km and generate forecasts every hour. This matters because the value of weather intelligence often depends on how precisely a forecast can answer a local question.

WeatherNext 3 uses a five-kilometer grid for surface temperature, picking up mountain ranges and coastlines that blur into blocky shapes in WeatherNext 2's 25-kilometer grid. Image credit: Google DeepMind

Agriculture provides an obvious example. A farmer does not simply need to know whether rainfall is expected across a region or even a district of Kenya. The useful question is whether it is likely to rain sufficiently in a particular location over the next few days to justify planting. Ignitia has been working on this localisation challenge for years, using machine learning and meteorological and satellite data to generate highly localised forecasts specifically for tropical climates, where weather conditions can vary substantially over relatively short distances.

But the same principle extends well beyond agriculture. Renewable-energy operators, for example, need to anticipate local wind, cloud cover and solar radiation (variables explicitly included in WeatherNext 3 for renewable-energy applications). Governments and humanitarian organisations need better information about where extreme rainfall or heat is likely to hit. Insurers and financial institutions need increasingly granular information to understand physical climate risks. Logistics companies, infrastructure operators and businesses making decisions about supply chains all have exposure to weather.

3. Turning forecasts into actionable intelligence

Better models aren’t enough. The third opportunity, and perhaps the most important, is moving from weather forecasts to weather intelligence. A more accurate forecast has limited value unless it can be translated into a decision: whether to plant, issue an early warning, alter a delivery route, protect an asset, adjust energy generation, price risk or manage exposure.

This is ultimately about the long-standing issue of user-centred design, a recurring theme in Tech for Development. Few would dispute its importance, but then it is too often forgotten in implementation, particularly when excitement around new technologies shifts attention towards what the technology can do rather than what users actually need.

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The starting point should not be what information increasingly sophisticated AI models can produce, but what decisions users need to make and what information will help them make those decisions. A technically superior forecast will have little practical value if it is delivered at the wrong time, at the wrong geographic scale, through an inaccessible channel or in a form that users cannot easily translate into action.

Transforming forecasts into “actionable intelligence” is the critical layer of innovation between increasingly powerful weather models and the organisations and individuals that ultimately need to act on their outputs.

TomorrowNow is an example of what this can look like in practice. It is integrating Google’s AI weather models with crop, location and agronomic information to turn forecasts into practical recommendations for farmers. The question is no longer simply “Will it rain?”, but “Are conditions suitable for planting now?”

TomorrowNow is also building a network of ground weather stations across East and Southern Africa to validate AI-powered forecasts against actual local conditions. That is an important reminder that AI does not make traditional weather infrastructure irrelevant. AI models, satellite data and ground observations increasingly need to work together.

Agriculture is one of the clearest applications, because the relationship between weather and individual decisions is so immediate. But the same model applies elsewhere: increasingly powerful general forecasting models can be combined with local data and sector-specific knowledge to translate their outputs into actionable intelligence.

Photo credit: CGIAR

For financial services, better weather intelligence could improve climate-risk assessment, parametric insurance, credit decisions for climate-exposed businesses and the design of financial products that help households and MSMEs anticipate and respond to climate shocks. For governments and development organisations, it could strengthen early-warning systems and disaster preparedness; for energy providers, it could improve forecasting of renewable generation and demand.

The opportunity for AI lies not only in predicting the weather more accurately, but in getting much more value from the weather data that are available: combining satellite, ground and modelled data to produce more granular forecasts, and designing applications that translate those forecasts into decisions. AI does not remove the need for better observational infrastructure, but it could make gaps in that infrastructure less constraining. Ultimately, the next frontier is making increasingly powerful predictions more useful to the people, businesses and institutions whose decisions depend on them.

For years, ArisTechia has been tracking developments in this space, with companies from Ignitia to TomorrowNow working to solve the weather intelligence conundrum.

This week, two developments put the spotlight on what AI can do to change the weather (and crop) forecasting game. The OpenAI Foundation is backing a USD 60 million initiative targeting weather and crop-disease forecasting for 100 million farmers, while Google has released a new version of its WeatherNext AI forecasting technology with forecasts at resolutions of up to 5 km.

10/09/26

OpenAI Foundation backs $60m AI forecasting initiative targeting 100m smallholder farmers

The OpenAI Foundation is providing USD 60 million to an initiative aiming to bring AI-powered weather and crop disease forecasting to 100 million smallholder farmers across South and Southeast Asia and East Africa over the next three years.

The initiative brings together the University of Chicago’s Development Innovation Lab, UC Berkeley, CIMMYT, Precision Development, Digital Green and AIM for Scale. It will work with national meteorological agencies and governments to develop and distribute more localised weather forecasts and crop disease information.

The programme will use AI-based weather models that require substantially less computing capacity than conventional forecasting approaches, potentially reducing the cost of producing localised forecasts. CIMMYT will also use AI and NASA Earth-observation data to improve forecasting of wheat pathogen outbreaks.

For last-mile delivery, Precision Development will support the distribution of forecasts and agricultural advice through channels including text messages, voice calls and chatbots. Digital Green will integrate improved forecasts into FarmerChat, its AI-enabled advisory solution, which currently reaches more than 2.1 million farmers.

Photo credit: OpenAI Foundation

AIM for Scale, an initiative based at New York University Abu Dhabi and jointly funded by the UAE and the Gates Foundation, will work with governments and multilateral development banks to support larger-scale financing, building on AI-powered forecasting work that reached 38 million farmers in India in 2025.

Why it matters

At USD 60 million and a target of 100 million farmers, this is one of the largest investments to date in applying AI to smallholder agriculture. The programme will test whether the scale already achieved in India, where AI-powered forecasts reached 38 million farmers in 2025, can be replicated across countries in Asia and Africa.

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03/09/26

Google upgrades WeatherNext AI weather forecasting with 5 km resolution

Google DeepMind and Google Research have launched WeatherNext 3, the latest version of Google’s AI-based weather forecasting technology, offering more frequent and higher-resolution forecasts.

WeatherNext 3 incorporates live satellite observations and generates new global forecasts every hour. Google says it can provide temperature and moisture forecasts at resolutions of up to 5 km, compared with 25 km for WeatherNext 2, while precipitation forecasts are up to 50% more accurate for forecasts one day or more ahead.

Image credit: Magnific

Google says the improvements are particularly significant in Latin America, Africa and Asia-Pacific, where high-resolution forecasting has historically been constrained by the cost of running regional forecasting systems. The model is being made available through Google Earth Engine, BigQuery and Google Cloud and will also feed into Google products including Search, Maps and Gemini.

WeatherNext is already being used in digital agriculture. In Zambia, climatetech non-profit TomorrowNow is integrating WeatherNext models into the country’s national Digital Climate Advisory Service, which provides localised weather and agricultural advisories to smallholder farmers.

Why it matters

WeatherNext 3 could improve the quality and localisation of weather information available to digital agriculture services, particularly in countries with limited forecasting infrastructure. Higher-resolution and more frequently updated forecasts could support more locally relevant decisions around planting, irrigation and harvesting, while AI-based forecasting could reduce some of the computing costs associated with producing this information.

13/09/26

BRICS backs new Digital Agriculture Network at New Delhi summit

BRICS leaders have backed a new initiative to support cooperation in digital agriculture as part of a wider package of agricultural initiatives endorsed at the 18th BRICS Summit, held in New Delhi on 12–13 September.

The network BRICS Network on Digital Agriculture identifies several areas of collaboration including AI-based decision-support tools, geospatial intelligence, satellite crop monitoring, IoT, agricultural data platforms, digital extension services and digital public infrastructure. It will also support joint research, demonstration projects and capacity building.

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The initiative was originally agreed by BRICS agriculture ministers in June and will initially be coordinated by the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi), with member countries contributing technologies, experience and policy approaches. Rather than a single BRICS-wide digital platform, the network is intended as a framework through which individual projects and technologies can be developed and shared.

The New Delhi summit also backed wider agricultural cooperation on agroecology and regenerative agriculture, genetic resources and farmers’ rights in seed systems.

Why it matters

The network brings together major agricultural economies including India, China, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa around practical applications of AI, geospatial technologies and digital public infrastructure in agriculture. Its value will ultimately depend on whether this cooperation produces technologies, data infrastructure and approaches that can be deployed beyond individual countries.

03/09/26

AgriConnect reaches 10 million farmers in Africa in first year

A new World Bank blog reports that the World Bank Group and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) have reached at least 10 million farmers in Africa through targeted investments under AgriConnect, one year after launching the initiative.

AgriConnect aims to connect 300 million family and smallholder farmers globally to markets, finance and agricultural services by 2030. Africa has been an early focus, accounting for five of the first ten country compacts launched under the initiative.

AgriConnect combines investments across six areas: AgTech, innovative finance, farmer cooperatives, infrastructure, policy reform, and skills, extension and research. In Togo, for example, the programme aims to mobilise more than USD 100 million in private capital and increase agriculture’s share of bank lending from around 1.2% to 5%. Planned interventions include digital farmer registries, insurance, warehouse financing and credit guarantees.

15/09/26

Grow Indigo pays 2,500 Indian farmers for carbon credits

Indian agritech Grow Indigo, a joint venture between Indian seed company Mahyco and US-based agritech Indigo Ag, has made carbon credit payments to around 2,500 farmers in Punjab and Haryana, in one of the first examples of Indian smallholders receiving income from agricultural carbon markets.

Farmers received payments ranging from approximately USD 34 to USD 170 for more than 57,000 carbon credits generated from regenerative agricultural practices adopted between 2019 and 2022. These included direct-seeded rice, which can reduce methane emissions by nearly 90 per cent, as well as low-tillage residue management.

Image credit: ESGNews.Earth

The credits form part of Grow Indigo’s Aadi carbon farming project, which received its first issuance earlier this year under the VM0042 methodology developed by carbon standards organisation Verra to measure and verify emission reductions and soil carbon removals from improved agricultural practices. The issuance covered around 30,000 acres in Punjab and Haryana. Under its original agreements with farmers, Grow Indigo says farmers are entitled to 75% of net revenues from the sale of their credits.

However, the credits have not yet been fully sold to buyers. With the sales process taking longer than expected, Grow Indigo offered farmers an immediate fixed payment funded by the company itself rather than waiting for the credits to be sold. Most farmers opted for the fixed payment.

Why it matters

The payments provide an early test of whether agricultural carbon markets can translate verified emissions reductions into additional income for smallholders. They also highlight one of the challenges: the process from adopting new farming practices to verification, credit issuance, sale and farmer payment can take several years. Grow Indigo’s decision to advance payments reduces that delay for farmers, but transfers some of the carbon price and buyer-demand risk to the company.

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11/09/26

Cameroon extends digital cocoa traceability partnership

Cameroon’s National Cocoa and Coffee Board (NCCB) has renewed its partnership with agritech company COOKO for another three years, as the country expands efforts to improve digital traceability across its cocoa supply chain.

The partnership, first established in 2021, uses digital tools to support first-mile traceability, including farm mapping, geospatial monitoring, traceable harvesting and transaction records. The renewed agreement will also support research into cocoa quality, farmer incomes and other areas.

Photo credit: CocoaRadar

The initiative forms part of a broader push to strengthen cocoa traceability in Cameroon. The NCCB has also developed the ONCC TRACE platform to track cocoa transactions, alongside initiatives to collect and share georeferenced farm data.

Why it matters

Digital traceability is becoming increasingly important for cocoa-producing countries as export markets introduce stricter sustainability and deforestation requirements, including the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). For Cameroon, better farm and supply-chain data could help exporters demonstrate compliance and maintain access to the EU market, while potentially improving visibility over how cocoa moves from farmers to buyers.

14/09/26

Kenya’s Twiga Foods enters statutory administration

Kenyan agritech company Twiga Foods has entered a formal administration process after years of financial difficulties and pressure from creditors.

GT Flow Limited, formerly known as Twiga Foods One Limited and an operating entity within the Twiga Foods group, was placed under statutory administration on 17 August, according to a notice published in the Kenya Gazette in September. Creditors and suppliers have been given 30 days to submit their claims.

Founded in 2014, Twiga built a technology-enabled distribution platform connecting farmers and food suppliers with urban vendors and kiosks in Kenya. The company became one of Africa’s best-funded agritech startups, raising more than USD 160 million from investors including the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Goldman Sachs and Creadev.

Twiga has faced financial pressure for several years, including supplier debts, successive rounds of job cuts and disputes with creditors. The company subsequently sought to move towards a more asset-light distribution model, including through investments in established Kenyan FMCG distributors.

Why it matters

Twiga’s difficulties come despite substantial investor backing. A USD 35 million convertible round secured in late 2023 ranked in the top 1% of comparable deals for Kenyan startups but was not enough to put the business on a sustainable footing. Twiga’s experience shows that even significant amounts of capital cannot compensate indefinitely for a business model struggling with high operating costs and weak unit economics.

25/08/26

ThriveAgric raises $4m to finance agri commodity purchases in Nigeria

Nigerian agritech ThriveAgric has raised ₦5.3 billion (approximately USD 4 million) through its debut commercial paper issuance, exceeding its initial ₦5 billion target. The issuance is the first under a ₦50 billion commercial paper programme, giving the company a new source of short-term financing to support its agricultural operations.

The capital will primarily fund ThriveAgric’s commodity aggregation activities, providing working capital to purchase crops from its network of smallholder farmers, consolidate volumes and sell them to food processors and other large commercial buyers. The funding helps bridge a key financing gap between when farmers need to be paid for their produce and when payments from offtakers are received.

Photo credit: Techpoint Africa

Founded in 2017, ThriveAgric operates a technology-enabled platform connecting farmers with finance, inputs and markets, and has worked with more than one million farmers across Africa. Following its 2022 funding round, the company announced plans in 2023 to raise a further USD 30 million, with a focus on debt financing, to support expansion in Nigeria and other African markets. ThriveAgric now operates in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, although Nigeria still accounts for around 90% of its business.

Why it matters

Being an agritech is ultimately as much about being an agribusiness in the value chains as it is about technology. As ThriveAgric moves larger volumes of produce between farmers and offtakers, it needs significant working capital to purchase and aggregate commodities.

Commercial paper gives the company access to potentially cheaper short-term debt that is well suited to this cycle. The raise shows that scaling agritech is not only about technology, but also about building the financial and operational infrastructure needed to move agricultural products at scale.

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25/08/26

FCMB expands agritech strategy with AI, data-driven finance and African expansion

Nigeria’s First City Monument Bank (FCMB) is expanding its agritech strategy, with plans to use AI, agricultural data and digital tools to improve access to finance and services for smallholder farmers. The plans are outlined in its Agritech Alumni Impact Report, covering the programme’s evolution between 2018 and 2026.

New initiatives include AI-powered platforms providing real-time advisory services in local languages including Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo, alongside lending models using weather and soil data. FCMB is also exploring using USSD-based technologies to reach farmers without smartphones or reliable internet access in the last mile. Other areas include climate-resilient agricultural finance, bundled insurance and animal healthcare solutions.

The strategy builds on an agritech programme launched in 2018 that has evolved from a startup competition into a broader ecosystem connecting agritechs with finance, investors and development partners. Supported companies include Crop2Cash, whose USSD platform helps smallholder farmers access financial services. FCMB has also worked with partners including FMO, UNDP and the Mastercard Foundation, while its wider agricultural finance activities include working-capital, equipment and commodity finance.

FCMB is now looking beyond Nigeria, with plans to support Nigerian agritechs expanding into other African markets, including Ghana, Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia and Kenya. IFC estimates the financing gap for smallholder farmers and agricultural SMEs in sub-Saharan Africa at USD 117 billion.

Why it matters

The bigger story is the centrality of AI for both advisories and financing. Smallholder farmers often lack the collateral, credit histories and formal records required by conventional lenders. Digital agriculture tools can help fill this gap by generating alternative data on farmers, transactions, soils and weather, enabling financial institutions to assess agricultural risks differently. FCMB’s approach points to a broader shift from banks simply financing agritechs to using agritech as infrastructure for agricultural finance.

31/08/26

SunCulture launches employee-wide ownership programme

Kenyan agritech SunCulture has launched RainDrops, a new programme giving all full-time employees the opportunity to share financially in the company’s future success. The scheme extends across the workforce, from employees installing and servicing systems in the field to office-based roles.

Employees will accumulate RainDrops over time, reflecting their contribution to the company. In the event of a future liquidity event, employees will be eligible for a financial reward based on the RainDrops they have accumulated.

Photo credit: SunCulture

Founded in 2013, SunCulture provides solar-powered irrigation systems alongside financing, installation, maintenance and advisory services to smallholder farmers. The company raised an oversubscribed USD 27.5 million Series B in 2024 and has continued to attract institutional and impact capital, including a USD 5 million investment from WaterEquity in 2025 to support its expansion.

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Why it matters

RainDrops is another sign of SunCulture’s evolution from agritech startup into a more mature business. Having raised significant growth capital and expanded its operations, the company is now extending participation in its future value across its workforce.

For an agritech like SunCulture, scaling is not only about technology (see also the ThriveAgric story in this issue). It also depends on the people selling, installing and servicing that technology in the field. Broadening employee participation can help align and retain the workforce needed to support that growth.

Asia

01/09/26

NABARD and Met Dept. add weather intelligence to India’s open climate agriculture platform

India’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) has partnered with the India Meteorological Department (IMD) to integrate official weather and agro-meteorological data into DiCRA, the country’s open digital platform for climate-resilient agriculture.

Under the agreement, IMD will provide district- and block-level weather forecasts, agricultural advisories, ground observations and weather alerts. A new Weather Portal will combine these with DiCRA’s existing geospatial data on soil moisture, vegetation health, crop conditions and climate vulnerability, providing more localised information for farmers and other agricultural stakeholders.

DiCRA was originally developed through UNDP Accelerator Lab India and was recognised as a Digital Public Good in 2022. NABARD now hosts the platform with technical support from UNDP. Its open data infrastructure already includes more than 30 geospatial layers, alongside tools covering areas such as climate vulnerability, livestock and crop-yield estimation.

The new weather intelligence will be available through DiCRA’s web and mobile interfaces, while open APIs will allow the data to be integrated into other digital services. Beyond farmers, the information is intended for financial institutions, policymakers and researchers, with potential applications including agri advisory, climate-risk assessment and rural finance.

Why it matters

DiCRA is an interesting example of DPI for agriculture, moving beyond individual farmer-facing applications towards an open data layer on which multiple services can be built. Open APIs allow agritechs and other service providers to use this shared infrastructure to develop their own solutions.

Integrating official weather forecasts with satellite and other agricultural data makes this infrastructure more useful and climate intelligence more actionable. It can support more localised advisory services and help farmers make better-informed decisions as weather patterns become increasingly unpredictable.

Opinion

31/08/26

Africa Food Systems Forum: AGRA calls for shift from productivity to farmer prosperity

At the Africa Food Systems Forum, currently taking place in Kigali, AGRA is calling for a rethink of agricultural transformation in Africa. The central argument is a compelling one: progress in production has not translated sufficiently into farmer prosperity. The call comes as AGRA marks its 20th anniversary and announces findings from its forthcoming Impact, Learning and Foresight Report 2026.

Photo credit: IGIHE News

The assessment presents a substantial but incomplete record. Agricultural output has doubled in real terms, local seed industries have expanded, and more than 25,000 agro-dealers and 33,000 community extensionists now connect farmers with inputs, knowledge and advisory services. But yields remain below the levels the region needs, productivity gaps persist and farmer incomes remain well below global averages. Hunger has also risen, while many farmers struggle to turn higher production into dependable incomes and agrifood businesses and institutions are not developing at the scale required. AGRA warns that, on its current trajectory, Africa will not meet the Kampala Declaration and CAADP targets for 2035.

What I find particularly useful is AGRA’s framing of the problem around three interconnected “traps”. A productivity trap limits reliable and resilient agricultural production; a value trap prevents increased output from consistently translating into farmer income, jobs, processing and trade; and a capability trap constrains the institutions, finance, data and accountability needed to sustain agricultural transformation.

The important point is that these problems cannot really be addressed in isolation. Better seeds, advisory services or technologies can increase production, but that progress means relatively little if farmers cannot reach markets, capture more value from what they produce or operate within institutions and value chains that work effectively. AGRA is therefore calling for a move away from isolated interventions towards more integrated food systems.

As more than 5,000 delegates from over 50 countries gather in Kigali for the 20th Africa Food Systems Forum, AGRA’s assessment offers a sobering backdrop: two decades of agricultural progress have still not solved the fundamental question of how farmers capture more value from what they produce.

Asia

15/07/26

Rize raises $31M to scale low-emission rice farming across Southeast Asia

Singapore-based agritech company Rize has raised USD 31 million in Series B funding to expand its low-emission rice operations across Southeast Asia. The round comprises USD 20 million in equity, led by BNP Paribas Asset Management Alts, and USD 11 million in debt financing.

Since raising USD 14 million in Series A funding in 2024, Rize has scaled its operations more than tenfold and now works with around 17,000 smallholder farmers across more than 50,000 hectares in Vietnam and Indonesia. The company is targeting more than 150,000 smallholder farmers and 300,000 hectares by 2030.

Photo credit: Rize

Rize promotes Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD), a rice irrigation practice that the company says can reduce methane emissions by up to 50%, cut water consumption by 20–30% and increase farmer incomes by up to 30% without reducing yields.

Digital technology remains central to Rize’s expansion. The new funding will support AI-powered tools for farmers and field teams, as well as greater field-to-buyer traceability. Rize says its low-emission rice can already be traced to field level, with 1,500 tonnes shipped to buyers in Europe, Canada, Australia and Singapore.

The company is also developing the carbon-finance component of its model. Its emissions reductions are independently verified, while its sustainable rice project is progressing through Gold Standard certification and is forecast to generate more than one million carbon credits over the next five years.

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07/08/26

Mitti Labs raises $9.5M to expand water-efficient rice farming across Asia

Climate-tech startup Mitti Labs has raised USD 9.5 million in a Series A round led by Aramco Ventures, with participation from Godrej Industries Group, Cisco Foundation, Volta Circle and existing investor Lightspeed India. The US-based company will use the funding to scale in India and launch projects in the Philippines and Indonesia.

Founded in 2023, Mitti Labs works primarily with smallholder rice farmers, using digital technology to support climate-smart farming practices that reduce water consumption and methane emissions.

Photo credit: Mitti Labs

Its digital monitoring, reporting and verification (dMRV) platform combines satellite remote sensing, AI, crop modelling and field-level data. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery is used to monitor individual rice fields, alongside data collected through smartphones and IoT devices, enabling the company to track farming practices and their environmental impact at scale.

Verified reductions in methane emissions can then be converted into carbon credits, with participating farmers receiving a share of the revenues. Mitti Labs says its programmes have delivered water savings of around 40% and increased farmer incomes by 20% through carbon-credit revenue sharing. The company reportedly reached around 69,000 farmers in India during the 2025-26 crop seasons.

Why it matters

Both Mitti Labs and Rize are combining lower-emission rice practices with digital tools to measure environmental outcomes and connect smallholders to new sources of value, including carbon markets. Remote sensing, AI and digital traceability can make monitoring viable across fragmented small farms. Their expansion across Asia suggests low-emission rice is moving beyond pilots, although the key test will be whether these models scale while delivering meaningful economic value to farmers.

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10/08/26

Beanstalk launches Monsoon Ventures to scale Southeast Asian agritech

Consulting firm and catalyst Beanstalk AgTech launched Monsoon Ventures on 10 August, a Singapore-based venture studio backed by Enterprise Singapore and Rabo Foundation to support the commercialisation of agricultural technologies across Southeast Asia. The studio will initially operate across Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.

Monsoon Ventures is launching with around USD 940,000 in initial funding and aims to support eight ventures during its first two years and more than 30 within five years. It will combine investment with commercial expertise, value-chain mapping and connections to investors and strategic partners to help technologies move from proof-of-concept to commercial deployment.

Why it matters

The launch follows research published by Beanstalk and market intelligence firm Briter earlier this year highlighting a widening gap between agritech’s potential and investment across South and Southeast Asia, including a funding bottleneck between Seed and Series A and difficulties scaling across fragmented national markets. Monsoon Ventures represents an attempt to address that commercialisation gap through hands-on venture building and country-specific market support.

17/08/26

India’s AgriStack surpasses 100 million digital Farmer IDs

India has created more than 103 million digital Farmer IDs under AgriStack, marking a major milestone in the rollout of the country’s Digital Agriculture Mission. As of 3 August, the government had also conducted its Digital Crop Survey across 648 districts, covering more than 313 million plots during the 2025-26 Rabi season.

AgriStack is India’s digital public infrastructure (DPI) for agriculture, bringing together a Farmer Registry, geo-referenced village maps and a Crop Sown Registry. Farmer IDs link farmers’ details with digitised land records to create a digital identity that can be used to access agricultural services.

The Farmer Registry is being integrated with services including agricultural credit, crop insurance, weather advisories and minimum-support-price procurement. The government says AgriStack is built using a federated architecture, with states retaining ownership of the data and farmer consent required for data sharing.

Why it matters

Crossing 100 million Farmer IDs shows the scale at which agricultural DPI is now being deployed in India. The key test will be whether this infrastructure can translate digital identity and farm-level data into easier access to services for farmers, while maintaining inclusion, consent and effective data governance.

Africa

27/07/26

Nigeria’s Fishcluster secures $1M in commitments for AI-powered aquaculture technology

Nigerian aquatech startup Fishcluster has secured around USD 1 million in commercial commitments for its AI and robotics system for fish farms, as it begins piloting the technology with large-scale aquaculture operators.

Fishcluster combines underwater sensors, computer vision, automated feeding and AI to monitor fish behaviour and water conditions and optimise feeding. Feed accounts for around 75% of the cost of operating a commercial fish pond in Nigeria. The full Fishcluster system costs around NGN 1.5 million (USD 1,100) per unit, with commitments for around 1,000 units from three large-scale operators.

Image credit: Fishcluster

While its initial customers are larger farms, Nigeria has a substantial small-scale aquaculture sector. FAO estimates the country has around 285,000 catfish producers, about 60% of whom are small-scale, alongside established producer clusters and cooperatives. The Eriwe fish farming cluster, for example, brings together nearly 600 producers.

Why it matters

Aquatech is gaining traction in Africa after expanding rapidly in Asian markets. But at around USD 1,100 per unit, Fishcluster’s technology remains expensive for many small producers. The bigger opportunity may be reaching them indirectly through cooperatives, financing, leasing or other value-chain models, turning technology developed for commercial farms into shared infrastructure for small-scale aquaculture.

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30/07/26

Digital dairy cooperatives open new routes to finance in Kenya

NGO Heifer International, Mastercard, KCB Foundation and KCB Bank Kenya have launched a nine-month initiative targeting 30,000 smallholder dairy farmers across 60 cooperatives and farmer organisations in Kenya.

The project will digitise milk deliveries, payments, savings and input purchases, creating transaction histories that can support access to formal credit and other financial services. Mastercard’s Farm Pass will provide digital farmer profiles and transaction records, while KCB will provide accounts, digital payments and financial services.

Why it matters

This is the second major initiative this year using Kenya’s dairy cooperatives to build digital farmer and transaction records. In February, KNCCI, Africa Guarantee Fund and Space AI launched a similar programme combining farmer profiling, milk data capture and automated payments. The two initiatives point to a broader shift towards using dairy cooperatives as a digital data layer through which lenders and other service providers can reach smallholder farmers.

17/08/26

Lersha and Dashen Bank launch digital financing initiative for Ethiopian agro-dealers

Ethiopian agritech company Lersha and Dashen Bank have launched a digital financing initiative aimed at improving agro-dealers’ access to working capital and strengthening the supply of agricultural inputs to smallholder farmers.

The project is part of the Advancing Inclusive Rural & Agriculture Digital Ecosystems (AIRADE) initiative, led by the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) alongside Ethiopia’s Ministry of Agriculture, the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Institute (ATI) and the Gates Foundation. Lersha will digitise agro-dealer inventory and transaction data to support credit scoring, while Dashen Bank will finance inputs by paying wholesalers directly, with participating agro-dealers repaying the loans from sales proceeds.

Photo credit: Dashen Bank

According to Lersha, the initiative aims to digitise 108 agro-dealers and indirectly reach more than 54,000 smallholder farmers across 36 woredas in Oromia, Sidama, Amhara and Central Ethiopia.

The initiative builds on Lersha’s wider use of digital profiles and credit scoring to expand agricultural finance in Ethiopia. Its platform combines digital services with a network of local agents to connect smallholders with inputs, finance, advisory services and markets.

Why it matters

Rather than focusing digital credit assessment on individual farmers, the model targets agro-dealers as a financing bottleneck in the agricultural input chain. Turning cash-based inventory and transactions into digital records could help lenders assess rural businesses without conventional credit histories, while improving smallholder access to agricultural inputs.

Innoterra’s Indian subsidiary files for IPO

Swiss agritech company Innoterra has filed draft papers for an initial public offering (IPO) of its Indian subsidiary. The company plans to use the proceeds to expand its dairy collection network, fund working capital and pursue acquisitions. Part of the proceeds will be used to establish new bulk milk collection centres and upgrade existing cooling infrastructure.

Launched in 2020, Innoterra has built India’s largest B2B milk procurement platform by volume procured. Through its MilkLane solution, the company sources aflatoxin safe and antibiotic safe raw milk from farmers for institutional customers, while also supplying cattle nutrition products under the MilkLane Aayush brand. As of 31 December 2025, the company operated 122 bulk milk collection centres across India.

Image credit: Innoterra

Alongside its dairy business, Innoterra operates Farmlink, a B2B marketplace that enables retailers and wholesalers to source fresh fruit and staple crops directly from farmers and farmer producer organisations (FPOs). In 2024, the company strengthened its fresh produce business through the acquisition of Fasal’s distribution network, adding access to around 85,000 acres of farmers while allowing Fasal to focus on its AI powered precision agriculture platform.

Why it matters

While Innoterra has attracted less attention than some of India’s better known agritech startups, its proposed IPO reflects growing confidence in digital platforms serving one of the country’s most strategic sectors. Rather than focusing on technologies used on the farm, the company digitises agricultural procurement, market linkages and dairy collection, all critical functions in India’s fragmented food system. Its IPO suggests investors increasingly recognise the value of platforms that modernise agricultural supply chains and strengthen links between farmers, FPOs, processors and retailers.

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06/07/26

Madagascar rolls out national digital agriculture infrastructure

Madagascar has launched a national digital agriculture platform and three new digital services designed to improve farm productivity, strengthen climate resilience and expand farmers’ access to market information. The initiative forms part of the country’s broader digital agriculture roadmap and is being implemented by the ministries responsible for agriculture, livestock and digital development, with support from the World Bank through the Korea–World Bank Partnership Facility (KWPF).

The new digital ecosystem includes a national farmer registry, a market information and weather alert service, and a digital advisory platform providing location-specific recommendations based on crops, climate and farming conditions. The programme also includes digital innovations for the livestock sector, including smart beehive monitoring and digital animal health surveillance tools.

The initiative builds on a national digital agriculture roadmap developed with support from the World Bank and FAO, prioritising data sovereignty while enabling data sharing across public and private sector platforms.

Agriculture plays a pivotal role in Madagascar’s economy. According to the World Bank, the sector accounts for almost 30% of GDP, generates around 40% of export revenues, and supports the livelihoods of nearly 70% of the country’s workforce.

Why it matters

Madagascar’s initiative illustrates how digital agriculture is moving beyond Africa’s leading technology markets. The rollout of national digital infrastructure in a lower-income economy underlines the growing recognition that digital tools are becoming an essential component of agricultural productivity, climate resilience and food security.

06/07/26

Vietnam launches programme to train 750,000 digital farmers by 2030

Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Environment has announced plans to train approximately 750,000 agricultural workers between 2026 and 2030 as part of a national programme to build a more digitally skilled farming workforce.

The curriculum will extend beyond agricultural production to include digital transformation, e-commerce, agricultural economics, sustainable farming practices and climate change adaptation. The initiative forms part of Vietnam’s broader strategy to professionalise agriculture and strengthen farmers’ ability to use digital technologies throughout the value chain.

The programme comes as digital tools become increasingly common in Vietnamese agriculture. In Vĩnh Long Province, for example, farmers are already using drones and satellite imagery to identify nutrient-deficient areas and apply fertiliser more precisely, reducing input use while improving resource efficiency.

Why it matters

The initiative reflects a growing recognition that the successful adoption of digital agriculture depends not only on access to technology but also on farmers’ ability to use digital tools effectively. If implemented at scale, Vietnam’s programme will be one of the largest agricultural digital skills initiatives in Southeast Asia.

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13/07/26

MTN shares results of cocoa value chain digitalisation efforts in Ghana

Mobile operator MTN Ghana has shared some interesting results from its work to digitise payments for smallholder farmers in the cocoa value chain. The initiative replaced cash-based transactions with mobile money payments, enabling farmers and labourers to receive payments directly into their mobile money wallets.

MTN and its partner Cargill Kokoo Sourcing onboarded more than 60,000 smallholder farmers across 20 districts in the Eastern, Western, Western North, Ashanti and Ahafo regions, alongside more than 800 casual workers supporting the value chain.

Photo credit: MTN Ghana

For smallholder farmers and seasonal workers, cash payments increase risk, reduce transparency and limit access to formal financial services. MTN said that, for many participants, receiving income digitally represented their first entry point into the formal financial ecosystem.

Cargill Kokoo Sourcing is a licensed buying company (LBC). Incorporating digital payments allows it, as part of a broader effort by the agribusiness, to digitise the value chain through a standardised management system that maintains full farm-to-fork visibility, supporting traceability, reducing inefficiencies and increasing transparency.

Ghana is the world’s second-largest cocoa producer (after Ivory Coast), accounting for roughly 20-25% of global supply. The crop employs about 800,000 smallholder farm families, generates roughly USD 2 billion in annual foreign exchange, and accounts for about 7% of the nation’s GDP.

29/06/26

Good reads: ILRI digital advisory services reach 1.5 million farmers and livestock keepers

Digital advisory services supported by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) have now reached 1.5 million farmers and livestock keepers across Ethiopia, Kenya and Senegal, with almost one third of users being women. The milestone, highlighted in ILRI’s 2026 Corporate Report, reflects the growing use of digital climate information and decision support tools to strengthen the resilience of livestock-based farming systems.

In Ethiopia, ILRI and its partners are supporting the Ethiopian Digital Agro Climate Advisory Platform, working with agritech company Lersha to deliver climate information and livestock advice through radio programmes, mobile voice messages in local languages and toll-free advisory services. More than 130,000 farmers and extension agents have already received guidance on climate smart feed and forage management through the initiative.

Why it matters

ILRI’s work demonstrates that some of the most scalable digital advisory services continue to rely on voice-based communication and local languages, rather than smartphone apps alone. Delivering climate information and farming advice in formats that are accessible and familiar to farmers can significantly broaden uptake, particularly among smallholders with limited digital literacy or internet access.

06/07/27

Good Reads: Why AI at the edge could transform digital agriculture

Artificial intelligence is often associated with massive cloud data centres. Yet “Beyond the Cloud: Edge AI for LMICs”, a new report from GSMA Mobile for Development, argues that the future of AI in low- and middle-income countries may look very different.

Rather than relying entirely on distant cloud infrastructure, many AI applications are expected to process information directly on smartphones, sensors and other connected devices. For agriculture, this means farmers could increasingly access crop diagnostics, pest identification and advisory services even where connectivity is unreliable.

Edge AI: Use cases by sector

Source: GSMA Mobile for Development

The report also challenges the assumption that bigger AI infrastructure is always better. Instead, it advocates matching computing power to the task at hand. A crop disease model running on a farmer’s smartphone, for example, may be far more practical and cost-effective than sending every image to a remote server. Cloud computing will remain important, particularly for training models, but day to day decision support is likely to become far more distributed.

Crop disease detection: on-device vs cloud inference cost

Source: GSMA Intelligence

Another important insight is that smartphones are becoming more than communication devices. As AI capable handsets become more common, they are evolving into the delivery platform for intelligent agricultural services across emerging markets. At the same time, they also become valuable sources of field data, helping improve future AI models through images and observations collected by farmers themselves.

For readers interested in digital agriculture, the report is a timely reminder that in emerging markets successful AI deployment will depend less on the largest models and more on designing solutions for local realities: affordable devices, intermittent connectivity and practical farmer needs. In emerging markets, the next wave of agricultural AI may be built not in hyperscale data centres, but in millions of smartphones already in farmers’ pockets.

The group now serves more than 9.9 million registered users, up from 9.6 million a year earlier, through digital agriculture solutions n South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Together, these solutions support agricultural productivity by improving access to advisory services, finance, insurance, digital payments, markets and agricultural inputs.

At the core of the portfolio is eVuna (formerly Connected Farmer), a B2B2C platform that enables agribusinesses, financial institutions and governments to digitally engage with smallholder farmers. The platform supports farmer registration, advisory services, insurance, market linkages, e-vouchers and specialised applications including dairy management and digital produce reconciliation.

Image credit: Vodacom/Mezzanine

In Tanzania, M-Kulima allows agribusinesses to register farmers digitally, deliver advisory services and make payments through M-Pesa, while partnerships with agricultural cooperatives extend the platform’s reach to rural communities.

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The report places particular emphasis on Moloni in the DRC. This is a free service, which provides weather forecasts, sustainable farming advice and a digital marketplace. Vodacom completed a pilot reaching around 10,000 farmers and is now moving into large-scale implementation. As part of a new food security programme in the conflict-affected Kasai region, farmers receive seeds and farming tools through an e-vouchering system before being connected to Moloni to access agronomic advice, climate information and market opportunities. Integration with M-Pesa loans aims to improve financial inclusion, while partnerships with local organisations are expected to support wider adoption of the platform.

Vodacom also offers M-Koba in Tanzania, a digital platform that digitises rural community savings groups. During FY2026, active groups increased from 213,000 to almost 300,000, while total savings grew by 81%. Women account for most participants, underlining the platform’s contribution to financial inclusion.

Why it matters

Vodacom’s results show that digital agriculture can be a long-term strategic capability for telcos, not just a CSR initiative. Through eVuna, M-Kulima and AgriTech Moloni, Vodacom has built a portfolio of agriculture-specific services combining connectivity, mobile money, digital platforms and partnerships.

Its scale, almost 10 million registered users across several African markets, shows the role telcos can play beyond connectivity, especially given their rural reach, trusted brands and payment infrastructure. Vodacom’s early investment in Mezzanine, whose agriculture platform evolved into eVuna, also shows the value of building in-house capabilities rather than relying only on third-party startups.

This model is especially important in more vulnerable countries such as the DRC, where startup ecosystems are less mature and telcos can play a broader role as providers of national digital infrastructure and digital services.

India’s Unnati Agri secures debt financing for post-merger expansion

Indian agritech Unnati Agri has secured INR 170 million (USD ~2 million) in debt financing from Recur Club, a debt facility focused on impact-driven startups ans SMEs In India. The funding will finance seasonal working capital requirements and support the expansion of the company’s distribution network. It will be used to procure inventory, strengthen distribution capabilities and help meet growing demand across India’s agricultural input market.

Founded in 2010, Unnati operates an integrated platform that enables farmers to purchase agricultural inputs, access credit and sell produce directly to agribusinesses. The company has on-ground partner stores in 48 districts in India.

Photo credit: Unnati

The latest funding follows the company’s acquisition of fellow agritech Gramophone earlier this year, creating a broader solution that combines agronomic advisory services, digital input distribution and embedded finance. According to the company, it is also preparing to raise USD 30–35 million in equity funding later this year to support its next phase of growth, with an IPO targeted within the next three to four years.

Why it matters

The funding reflects the growing financial maturity of India’s most established agritechs. As businesses scale, debt can provide a more efficient way to finance seasonal working capital than repeated equity rounds, allowing founders to limit shareholder dilution. At the same time, greater reliance on debt introduces new financial disciplines, requiring companies to carefully manage cash flows, inventory and repayment obligations as they expand.

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23/06/26

Tunisia’s RoboCare gets investment to expand AI-powered precision agriculture

Tunisian agritech RoboCare has secured new investment from VC firm 216 Capital to accelerate its expansion across Africa and the Middle East. Founded in 2020, the company has developed an AI-powered farm management platform that combines satellite imagery, drones, field sensors, weather data and agronomic expertise to monitor crop health, optimise irrigation and improve the use of agricultural inputs.

According to the company, trials with customers across North Africa have shown up to 35% reductions in water consumption, 25% lower input use and 20% productivity gains. RoboCare is currently focusing on strategic regional crops including olives, cereals and industrial tomatoes, with AI models tailored to local soil and climate conditions. The new investment will support commercial expansion and the development of crop models for additional agricultural environments.

Why it matters

Back in 2021, I wrote a blog about water scarcity becoming one of the defining drivers of digital agriculture innovation in the Middle East and North Africa. RoboCare is a good example of that trend in action. In this context, the value of AI should be judged by the outcomes it delivers, not simply by the fact that it uses AI. In a region where agriculture accounts for the vast majority of freshwater withdrawals, technologies that help farmers produce more with less water are likely to become increasingly important as climate pressures intensify.

24/06/26

Sri Lanka’s Agrithmics digitises state-owned tea plantations

Sri Lankan agritech Agrithmics, which rebranded as Cultive8 in 2023, has deployed its digital estate management solution “Agrigen” at Goomera Estate, the first government-owned tea estate in Sri Lanka to adopt end-to-end digital operations.

The Agrigen solution replaces manual record-keeping across estate operations, digitising workforce management, field activities and operational reporting. Workers receive accurate and timely wages through automated payroll calculations, reducing the risk of manual errors, while field officers can capture attendance and tea plucking data in real time using mobile applications and digital scales, eliminating paper-based processes and reducing administrative workloads.

Photo credit: Sunday Island

Following the Goomera deployment, the State Plantation Corporation plans to roll out the platform across all of its estates.

The announcement follows Agrithmics’ recent expansion. In January, the company secured USD 650,000 from Hatch Fund Singapore to support regional growth, building on its USD 1.75 million Pre-Series A round completed in 2023. Since rebranding as Cultive8, the company has established its headquarters in Singapore while expanding operations across Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India.

Why it matters

An interesting government partnership, showing that B2G can be a scalable model for agritech companies in countries where governments are actively embracing digital agriculture. In this case, we are not talking about smallholder farming but large-scale plantation management. However, from an impact perspective, these types of solutions can still deliver significant benefits for rural livelihoods, particularly when they help build digital payment histories and make agricultural workers more bankable.

15/06/26

Analysis: Vodacom highlights growth of digital agriculture portfolio across Africa

Vodacom Group, one of Africa’s largest telecommunications companies, has published its ESG report for the period 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026, detailing its achievements across a broad portfolio of digital agriculture solutions supporting farmers and agribusinesses.

The group now serves more than 9.9 million registered users, up from 9.6 million a year earlier, through digital agriculture solutions n South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Together, these solutions support agricultural productivity by improving access to advisory services, finance, insurance, digital payments, markets and agricultural inputs.

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At the core of the portfolio is eVuna (formerly Connected Farmer), a B2B2C platform that enables agribusinesses, financial institutions and governments to digitally engage with smallholder farmers. The platform supports farmer registration, advisory services, insurance, market linkages, e-vouchers and specialised applications including dairy management and digital produce reconciliation.

Image credit: Vodacom/Mezzanine

In Tanzania, M-Kulima allows agribusinesses to register farmers digitally, deliver advisory services and make payments through M-Pesa, while partnerships with agricultural cooperatives extend the platform’s reach to rural communities.

The report places particular emphasis on Moloni in the DRC. This is a free service, which provides weather forecasts, sustainable farming advice and a digital marketplace. Vodacom completed a pilot reaching around 10,000 farmers and is now moving into large-scale implementation. As part of a new food security programme in the conflict-affected Kasai region, farmers receive seeds and farming tools through an e-vouchering system before being connected to Moloni to access agronomic advice, climate information and market opportunities. Integration with M-Pesa loans aims to improve financial inclusion, while partnerships with local organisations are expected to support wider adoption of the platform.

Vodacom also offers M-Koba in Tanzania, a digital platform that digitises rural community savings groups. During FY2026, active groups increased from 213,000 to almost 300,000, while total savings grew by 81%. Women account for most participants, underlining the platform’s contribution to financial inclusion.

Why it matters

Vodacom’s results show that digital agriculture can be a long-term strategic capability for telcos, not just a CSR initiative. Through eVuna, M-Kulima and AgriTech Moloni, Vodacom has built a portfolio of agriculture-specific services combining connectivity, mobile money, digital platforms and partnerships.

Its scale, almost 10 million registered users across several African markets, shows the role telcos can play beyond connectivity, especially given their rural reach, trusted brands and payment infrastructure. Vodacom’s early investment in Mezzanine, whose agriculture platform evolved into eVuna, also shows the value of building in-house capabilities rather than relying only on third-party startups.

This model is especially important in more vulnerable countries such as the DRC, where startup ecosystems are less mature and telcos can play a broader role as providers of national digital infrastructure and digital services.

Other news:

17/06/26

Kenya places digital agriculture at the heart of $11.4bn AgriConnect Compact

Kenya’s Agriculture and Livestock Cabinet Secretary, Mutahi Kagwe, has unveiled the AgriConnect Compact (2025–2030), a national agricultural transformation platform designed to modernise the country’s food system through digital technologies, public investment and private sector participation. Backed by a planned USD 11.4 billion investment package, including USD 3.8 billion in public funding and USD 7.6 billion from private investors, the initiative aims to strengthen agricultural value chains, improve food security and create 2.48 million jobs by 2030.

Digital agriculture sits at the heart of the strategy. Planned investments include digital extension services, farmer registries, e-vouchers, digital agriculture platforms for market traceability, digital marketplaces and digital supply chains, alongside irrigation, processing and logistics infrastructure designed to reduce post-harvest losses. The Compact also seeks to use public funding to de-risk agricultural investment and attract private capital, with support from development partners including the World Bank, IFAD, the African Development Bank and AGRA.

22/06/26

Indonesia’s agritech sector faces new setback following TaniHub investment ruling

Indonesia’s agritech ecosystem has suffered another blow after four former executives from state-backed venture capital funds were sentenced to prison over their investment in failed agritech startup TaniHub, once one of the country’s leading digital agriculture companies. TaniHub raised more than US$90 million before collapsing in 2022. Prosecutors argued that inadequate due diligence resulted in losses to the state, despite no allegations that the investors personally benefited from the investment. The ruling has sparked debate over where the line should be drawn between a failed venture investment and a criminal act, with industry observers warning that state-backed investors could become significantly more cautious about backing innovative but inherently risky startups.

Image credit: TaniHub Group

The case comes only months after former eFishery CEO Gibran Huzaifah was sentenced to nine years in prison over accounting fraud at Indonesia’s former agritech unicorn. Together, the two cases mark a sharp reversal for what was once regarded as one of Southeast Asia’s most vibrant agritech markets, raising fresh questions about governance, investor confidence and the future flow of capital into the sector.

Why it matters

Delivering value to farmers more often than not requires investment in physical infrastructure, logistics, procurement and field operations alongside digital platforms. The challenge is ensuring these increasingly complex businesses remain financially and operationally under control as they scale. In highly capital-intensive models, the pressure to grow quickly and satisfy investor expectations can expose weaknesses in governance, financial controls and reporting long before the underlying business model has fully matured. The Indonesian cases also highlight the need to distinguish between genuine business risk and criminal misconduct, an important consideration if governments want public capital to continue supporting innovation in sectors such as digital agriculture.

25/06/26

World Bank-backed programme to boost Cameroon’s digital agriculture ecosystem

Cameroon is not a country that gets the spotlight in digital agriculture news, making a recent World Bank featured story quite noteworthy. The story highlights how the country is scaling up investment in the sector through a World Bank-backed Digital Transformation Acceleration Project (PATNUC), combining startup support, digital infrastructure and farmer subsidies to drive adoption at scale. Agriculture employs almost 60% of the country’s population. The programme wants to tackle longstanding constraints around market access, inputs and productivity through locally developed digital solutions. Around 35,000 smallholder farmers are expected to receive agricultural inputs through a digital e-voucher system, while USD 4.4 million in matching grants will subsidise the adoption of agritech services by farmer groups. The initiative also aims to create 200 partnerships between agritech startups and producer organisations.

PATNUC is emerging as a key driver of Cameroon’s digital agriculture ecosystem. Beyond supporting individual startups, the programme combines digital infrastructure, startup acceleration and farmer incentives to help local agritech companies scale and accelerate technology adoption.

Source: Financial Express

At the centre of the story in the Financial Express newspaper is BHASHINI, a flagship initiative under India’s Digital India programme and National Language Translation Mission. Rather than building another farmer-facing application, BHASHINI provides a shared language layer that enables voice and text interactions across 23 Indian languages, supports 36 text languages, powers more than 800 government websites, and processes over 6 billion AI-powered language interactions and 15 million AI inferences every day.

The platform is already being embedded into agriculture at scale. Maharashtra’s MahaVISTAAR, a multilingual educational and advisory platform for farmers, combines crop guidance, weather intelligence, market prices and government schemes into a single AI-powered advisory service reaching more than 3 million farmers. In Gujarat, the Amul Sarlaben is a localised AI-powered dairy assistant offering personalised advice on animal health, nutrition, breeding and milk production to 3.6 million dairy farmers across 18,500 villages.

What caught my attention is that BHASHINI is not an agricultural platform. It is a shared capability that sector-specific services can plug into, allowing farmers to interact naturally in their own language rather than adapting to a new interface. The initiative can be described as attempting for language what Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has achieved for identity and payments: creating a common, reusable capability that supports an entire ecosystem instead of being rebuilt by every application.

Viewed alongside AgriStack, which provides digital farmer identities and agricultural data, and the Krishi Decision Support System, which delivers geospatial and agronomic intelligence, BHASHINI appears to add another layer to India’s evolving digital agriculture architecture.

Whether this approach ultimately translates into better outcomes for farmers remains, as always, to be seen. Adoption, governance, interoperability and institutional coordination will matter as much as the technology itself. But the idea of treating multilingual AI as shared infrastructure, rather than as a feature of individual applications, is an interesting one, and a model worth watching beyond India.

Nigerian agritech Agriarche secures Proparco backing

Nigerian agritech Agriarche has secured investment from Proparco, the private-sector financing arm of the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), to expand its tech-enabled agricultural platform and strengthen value chains in northern Nigeria.

Agriarche operates Kasuwa, a market linkage platform connecting smallholder farmers, aggregators, food processors and FMCG companies. The platform combines market information, payments and financing with aggregation, storage and logistics to improve market access and supply chain efficiency.

Photo credit: Agriarche - Kasuwa platform on Google Play.

The investment builds on previous funding secured in February 2025, when Agriarche received a USD 500,000 working capital loan from Sahel Capital’s Social Enterprise Fund for Agriculture in Africa (SEFAA), s programme supported by German development bank KfW to expand connections between farmers and FMCG companies.

According to Proparco, Agriarche now operates across nine Nigerian states, serving more than 25,000 farmers through its digital platform and fulfilment centres. The company reports generating more than USD12 million in transactions, while 42% of participating farmers are women. Proparco says that partnerships with input providers have also helped farmers achieve an average 40% reduction in production costs.

Why it matters

Yet another proof point that investors – in this case development finance institutions – continue to see significant potential for scale and impact in well-executed market linkage platforms built on digital value-chain infrastructure. Agriarche is not as large or as well known as other market linkage platforms, but it offers a compelling value proposition for both farmers and value chain actors, from access to inputs all the way to selling outputs. An interesting reminder that being small and well executed can matter more than being big and visible but lacking substance.

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05/11/26

Bangladesh’s iFarmer expands digital investment platform

Bangladesh agritech iFarmer has rebranded its agricultural funding platform from iFarmer Funding to iharvst, expanding its focus beyond crowdfunding to provide a broader range of investment opportunities across the agricultural value chain for agri-funders.

Launched in 2019, iFarmer is a full-stack agritech providing smallholders with access to agricultural inputs, financing, advisory services and markets through an integrated digital platform. The company also operates the Folon app, which provides personalised crop advice, connects farmers with agricultural experts, and gives access to loans.

Photo credit: iFarmer

The rebranding of iharvst follows a period of continued growth for the company. According to the company, iharvst has facilitated more than USD 10 million in agricultural financing and supported investments across over 700 farming projects, enabling individuals and institutions to participate in agricultural production through a digital platform. The solution is designed to channel capital into farming while improving transparency and access to investment opportunities.

In April 2026, iFarmer secured USD 1.5 million from Switzerland-based impact investment platform Symbiotics to expand agricultural input distribution and strengthen market linkages. The company had previously raised investment from UK-based Razor Capital and built partnerships with multiple financial institutions to provide loans and insurance products for farmers.

Beyond financing, iFarmer has established a nationwide physical network of more than 1,200 iFarmer Centers, partnering with agri-input retailers and traders to provide digital onboarding, advisory services and market access to farmers. The company estimates that it has supported more than 100,000 farmers through its integrated platform.

Agriculture remains a cornerstone of Bangladesh’s economy, employing around 40% of the national labour force and supporting an estimated 20 million farmers, around 80% of whom are smallholders.

Why it matters

It’s great to see how agritech models continue evolving in Bangladesh, with a bunch of innovators active in the market and positioning themselves as digital infrastructure connecting farmers, retailers, financial institutions and investors across the agricultural value chain. Besides iFarmer, other interesting companies to watch are Agromukam, Agroshift, WeGro and Fashol.

11/06/26

Nigerian insurtech Riwe secures UNDP backing to scale digital climate insurance

Nigerian climatech/insurtech Riwe has secured funding and a strategic partnership from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) and the Islamic Solidarity Fund for Development (ISFD) to expand digital climate insurance for smallholder farmers.

Founded in 2022, Riwe (from riweaku which means “keep eating well”) develops parametric weather insurance products that leverage satellite earth observation data and automated smart contracts to trigger payouts when predefined climate conditions are met. The platform is distributed through a USSD interface accessible on basic mobile phones and a network of community agents embedded in farming communities.

Under its RAIN (Resilience through Affordable and Inclusive Weather Insurance) programme, the company will establish community experience centres and work with partners including Leadway Assurance and Novus Microfinance Bank to provide insurance enrolment, agricultural input loans and weather advisory services.

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A key component of Riwe’s model is a digital identity layer designed for farmers with no formal financial history. By capturing farm-level data, climate exposure and insurance behaviour over time, the platform creates a digital profile that can support loan applications, insurance underwriting and product eligibility decisions, providing farmers with a data-backed entry point into the formal financial system.

Riwe currently serves more than 15,000 farmers and aims to reach 200,000 by 2030.

Why it matters

Digital agricultural insurance has long been one of agritech’s most challenging business models, constrained by high distribution costs and complex claims processes. However, the sector is gaining momentum as the combination of satellite data, AI intelligence and mobile channels make parametric insurance products easier to deliver and scale. Riwe’s funding adds to a growing body of evidence that digitally enabled agricultural insurance is attracting increasing institutional support in Africa, with larger players such as Pula and OKO leading the charge.

05/06/26

Kenya launches government-led AI platform for agriculture and food security

Kenya has officially launched ADAPT (AI-enabled Data for Agriculture Products & Transformation), a government-led initiative that brings together public institutions, research organisations, development partners and technology companies to apply AI, earth observation and advanced data analytics to agriculture and food security.

Led by the State Department of Agriculture under the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development, ADAPT-Kenya is supported by the Gates Foundation and Microsoft AI for Good Lab and brings together an extensive ecosystem of partners, including FAO, UNDP, Kenya Space Agency, KALRO, Kenya Meteorological Department, NASA Harvest, FEWS NET, University of Maryland, Ai2, AGRA and One Acre Fund.

The platform will combine satellite imagery, AI models and national data systems to support crop monitoring, yield forecasting, insurance zone delineation, disaster risk reduction and climate resilience, providing data and analytics that can inform agricultural planning and decision-making across the country. ADAPT-Kenya is also intended as the first country-level implementation of a broader ADAPT-Africa model designed for replication across the continent.

The launch comes as the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) is supporting complementary research on AI for climate-smart agriculture and food security in Kenya, focusing on agricultural data gaps, governance models and the conditions required to scale AI-enabled services responsibly and inclusively.

Why it matters

An interesting aspect of ADAPT is that it shifts the focus from individual AI applications towards shared agricultural intelligence. Rather than creating another farmer-facing advisory tool, the initiative combines AI, earth observation and national data resources into a common analytics platform capable of supporting multiple services, from crop monitoring and yield forecasting to insurance planning and disaster response. If successful, this government-led, multi-stakeholder approach could provide a blueprint for how countries build AI capabilities for agriculture: not as standalone applications, but as shared intelligence layers that enable a broad ecosystem of public and private services.

05/06/26

Innovator to watch: Sandi AI launches precision irrigation service

One of the more interesting digital agriculture launches this month comes from Uganda, where Sandi AI, an early stage company, has launched Sandi Moisture Intelligence, combining low-cost soil sensors, AI-powered analytics and community financing to help smallholder farmers optimise irrigation.

The solution uses 2–6 soil moisture sensors, costing USD 10–20 each and often bundled with Sandi-financed solar pumps or drip irrigation kits. The sensors collect real-time soil moisture data, which is combined with hyper-local weather forecasts, crop-specific water requirements, soil type, topography and evapotranspiration rates to generate irrigation recommendations.

Farmers receive guidance via WhatsApp (including voice notes), SMS or USSD, identifying which parts of their fields require watering immediately and which can wait. The system is designed to reduce pumping costs, prevent overwatering and nutrient leaching, and improve water-use efficiency, with calibration for local soil types in Uganda and Kenya.

Photo credit: Sandi AI

The service is offered free to members of Sandi AI’s rotational savings groups, who can access the sensors through community financing. According to its website Sandi AI has reached more than 10,000 active savings groups across Uganda and Kenya using a digitized chama model to help communities collectively save for solar systems, cookstoves, and water filters. It plans to expand into Tanzania. The company also provides aggregated water-efficiency reports that groups can use to strengthen applications for microfinance loans.

Why it matters

As climate variability increases, precision irrigation has remained out of reach for most smallholders because of hardware costs and complexity. Sandi AI’s model focuses on affordable sensors, embedded financing and simple digital interfaces to make data-driven irrigation accessible at community level. As usual with this kind of solutions, the challenge is scalability and maintenance of equipment but the focus on low-cost, easy-to-adopt services could significantly broaden adoption beyond commercial farms.

08/06/26

Analysis: India’s multilingual AI infrastructure is quietly transforming agricultural advisory

One of the most interesting articles I read this week (thanks to Vikram Kothari for sharing it on LinkedIn) wasn’t about a breakthrough AI model or another agritech funding round. Instead, it highlighted something less visible: the emergence of multilingual AI infrastructure as a foundational capability for digital agriculture.

Source: Financial Express

At the centre of the story in the Financial Express newspaper is BHASHINI, a flagship initiative under India’s Digital India programme and National Language Translation Mission. Rather than building another farmer-facing application, BHASHINI provides a shared language layer that enables voice and text interactions across 23 Indian languages, supports 36 text languages, powers more than 800 government websites, and processes over 6 billion AI-powered language interactions and 15 million AI inferences every day.

The platform is already being embedded into agriculture at scale. Maharashtra’s MahaVISTAAR, a multilingual educational and advisory platform for farmers, combines crop guidance, weather intelligence, market prices and government schemes into a single AI-powered advisory service reaching more than 3 million farmers. In Gujarat, the Amul Sarlaben is a localised AI-powered dairy assistant offering personalised advice on animal health, nutrition, breeding and milk production to 3.6 million dairy farmers across 18,500 villages.

What caught my attention is that BHASHINI is not an agricultural platform. It is a shared capability that sector-specific services can plug into, allowing farmers to interact naturally in their own language rather than adapting to a new interface. The initiative can be described as attempting for language what Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has achieved for identity and payments: creating a common, reusable capability that supports an entire ecosystem instead of being rebuilt by every application.

Viewed alongside AgriStack, which provides digital farmer identities and agricultural data, and the Krishi Decision Support System, which delivers geospatial and agronomic intelligence, BHASHINI appears to add another layer to India’s evolving digital agriculture architecture.

Whether this approach ultimately translates into better outcomes for farmers remains, as always, to be seen. Adoption, governance, interoperability and institutional coordination will matter as much as the technology itself. But the idea of treating multilingual AI as shared infrastructure, rather than as a feature of individual applications, is an interesting one, and a model worth watching beyond India.

In a country where agriculture employs more than 40% of the workforce, agritech startups are increasingly delivering weather, pest and market intelligence at scale. The piece argues that many first-generation digital advisory systems struggled because recommendations were often too generic or disconnected from local realities, limiting on-farm impact and behavioural adoption.

AI-driven models are now being used to personalise advisory around local weather conditions, crop cycles and farmer-specific needs. Digital Green’s Farmer.Chat platform, reaches around 7 million farmers across India and Africa, with approximately 60% of users reportedly taking action based on recommendations received through the platform. The article also highlights the World Economic Forum-backed Saagu Baagu initiative in Telangana, which uses AI and data-driven advisory to support chilli farmers through more localised recommendations.

Image credit: Digital Green

The piece argues that AI’s greatest contribution may not be making advisory more localised and relevant, but fundamentally changing the economics of agricultural extension. According to Digital Green, traditional extension services cost around $35 per farmer, compared to roughly $3.5 for video-based advisory, while GenAI-powered systems could reduce costs to as little as $0.35 per farmer.

At the same time, inclusion remains a challenge. Women account for approximately 45% of Farmer.Chat users, yet barriers around smartphone access, digital literacy, and participation in agricultural decision-making continue to limit adoption. The article warns that without stronger coordination between agritech platforms, public digital infrastructure, and government-led inclusion efforts, AI could reinforce rather than reduce existing inequalities.

Photo credit: Yabiladi.com

The funding will be allocated across several Africa-owned venture capital funds investing in sectors including fintech, healthtech, logistics, climate technologies, and agritech. While the announcement is not agriculture-specific, it represents an important signal for agritech startups in the region, where fundraising conditions remain challenging. Among the selected funds is Future Africa Fund III. Future Africa’s broader investment track record includes agriculture-related ventures such as ThriveAgric and Farmcrowdy.

For agritech, the announcement is less about immediate funding and more about who controls the flow of capital. As African institutions take a larger role in financing local innovation, they may also play a greater role in shaping which technologies, business models, and startups receive support. More broadly, AFC’s initiative reflects an effort to deepen local ownership within Africa’s innovation ecosystem and reduce dependence on external sources of venture capital.

Anthropic commits $200M to Gates Foundation, backs AI tools for farmers

Anthropic has committed USD 200 million in a mix of grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support to the Gates Foundation. The plan is to make AI tools more accessible and useful, while supporting the development of public goods, freely available resources, across health, education, and agriculture.

While the partnership is primarily aimed at improving health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, it also includes a dedicated agriculture component. This will support agri-specific enhancements to Claude, the development of local crop datasets, and the creation of benchmarks to evaluate AI performance across agricultural applications, with the resulting tools made available as public goods.

Ultimately, the goal is to lay the foundations for more intelligent and accessible agricultural advisory services. Leveraging locally relevant data and local languages, AI can deliver personalized, real-time guidance on planting decisions, soil health, crop diseases, livestock management, and market conditions. By lowering the cost and complexity of delivering this support at scale, the partnership could help strengthen decision-making for farmers, extension workers, financial institutions, and public agencies that serve them.

Just yesterday, Anthropic announced it raised USD 65 billion in its latest funding round (Series H) reaching an evaluation of USD 965 billion, making it leapfrog its arch-rival OpenAI as the to become world’s most valuable AI firm.

Why it matters

As public and donor funding for rural development comes under increasing pressure, Anthropic’s commitment highlights the growing role of private tech companies in supporting agricultural innovation. Importantly, the initiative focuses not on a single product or startup, but on developing shared AI capabilities, datasets and benchmarks that can underpin a new wave of agricultural advisory and decision-support services.

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20/05/26

ONO raises pre-Series A funding to digitise agri trade and embedded finance in India

Indian agritech startup ONO has raised USD 1.2 million pre-Series A round to expand its platform focused on digitising agricultural trade workflows and embedded finance for agri-SMEs and mandi (middlemen) ecosystems.

The company digitises operational processes across traditional agricultural markets, including mandi transactions, collections, and supply chain coordination, while using transaction-level data to support AI-driven underwriting and collateral-free working capital. Its user base spans farmers, traders, commission agents, and agri-SMEs operating across India’s fragmented agricultural supply chains.

Image credit: ONO

ONO is building digital infrastructure for agricultural commerce. Through products such as ONO Connect, which provides market information and price discovery, and ONO Cash, which offers working capital and farmer loans, the platform connects market participants while embedding finance into day-to-day agricultural transactions. The new funding will support the expansion of digital mandi operations, supply chain connectivity, and data-driven financial services.

Why it matters

While many agritechs focused on smallholder farmers operate through advisory, input distribution or marketplace models, ONO digitises the underlying trade and financial infrastructure surrounding agricultural value chains. As mandi ecosystems become more digitised and financeable, the resulting improvements in liquidity, collections, market coordination and working capital access can indirectly strengthen the broader smallholder ecosystem connected to them.

21/05/26

AFC and Hello Tractor partner on warehouse receipt finance in Kenya

Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC) has formalised a partnership with agritech platform Hello Tractor to scale a Warehouse Receipt System (WRS) finance product in Kenya, in collaboration with Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Kenya, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Warehouse Receipt System Council (WRSC).

The initiative combines warehouse storage and agricultural lending to enable smallholder farmers to access financing using stored crops as collateral. Under the model, farmers store produce in certified warehouses and receive warehouse receipts that can be used to secure short-term loans, helping reduce distress sales immediately after harvest.

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AFC will provide agricultural financing, while Hello Tractor will leverage its network of booking agents and farmer relationships to support onboarding and loan distribution at the local level. FSD Kenya and IFC are supporting de-risking and ecosystem development around warehouse receipt financing.

The partnership also comes as Kenya expands its electronic Warehouse Receipt System Central Registry eWRS-CR (see story on ArisTechia), part of a broader effort to digitise warehouse receipts and strengthen their use as collateral within agricultural finance and structured commodity trade.

According to AFC and FSD Kenya data, post-harvest losses among Kenyan smallholder farmers can reach 30–40% of production.

Why it matters

Hello Tractor is a unique example of a startup building momentum around mechanisation platforms on the continent, with more than 6,000 connected tractors across Africa. While previous initiatives such as its PAYG mechanisation financing programme in Ethiopia expanded access to equipment financing, the AFC partnership signals a broader move into post-harvest infrastructure and warehouse receipt finance, reinforcing Hello Tractor’s evolution into a wider agricultural infrastructure and finance platform.

18/05/26

Analysis: AFC’s $100M commitment signals a growing role for African capital in agritech

The Africa Finance Corporation, a multilateral finance institution established to catalyse private sector-led infrastructure investment across the region, has approved a USD 100 million commitment to Africa-focused technology fund managers, marking a push to increase the role of local institutional capital in the continent’s innovation ecosystem. In doing so, AFC aims to address the underrepresentation of African capital in venture funding and catalyse greater participation from local institutional investors.

Photo credit: Yabiladi.com

The funding will be allocated across several Africa-owned venture capital funds investing in sectors including fintech, healthtech, logistics, climate technologies, and agritech. While the announcement is not agriculture-specific, it represents an important signal for agritech startups in the region, where fundraising conditions remain challenging. Among the selected funds is Future Africa Fund III. Future Africa’s broader investment track record includes agriculture-related ventures such as ThriveAgric and Farmcrowdy.

For agritech, the announcement is less about immediate funding and more about who controls the flow of capital. As African institutions take a larger role in financing local innovation, they may also play a greater role in shaping which technologies, business models, and startups receive support. More broadly, AFC’s initiative reflects an effort to deepen local ownership within Africa’s innovation ecosystem and reduce dependence on external sources of venture capital.

16/05/26

Good Reads: AI may determine whether digital advisory finally works for smallholder farmers

A recent article by Digital Green CEO Nidhi Bhasin explores how India’s next phase of digital agriculture will depend less on scaling generic advisory platforms and more on leveraging AI to deliver contextual and actionable support for smallholder farmers.

In a country where agriculture employs more than 40% of the workforce, agritech startups are increasingly delivering weather, pest and market intelligence at scale. The piece argues that many first-generation digital advisory systems struggled because recommendations were often too generic or disconnected from local realities, limiting on-farm impact and behavioural adoption.

AI-driven models are now being used to personalise advisory around local weather conditions, crop cycles and farmer-specific needs. Digital Green’s Farmer.Chat platform, reaches around 7 million farmers across India and Africa, with approximately 60% of users reportedly taking action based on recommendations received through the platform. The article also highlights the World Economic Forum-backed Saagu Baagu initiative in Telangana, which uses AI and data-driven advisory to support chilli farmers through more localised recommendations.

The piece argues that AI’s greatest contribution may not be making advisory more localised and relevant, but fundamentally changing the economics of agricultural extension. According to Digital Green, traditional extension services cost around $35 per farmer, compared to roughly $3.5 for video-based advisory, while GenAI-powered systems could reduce costs to as little as $0.35 per farmer.

At the same time, inclusion remains a challenge. Women account for approximately 45% of Farmer.Chat users, yet barriers around smartphone access, digital literacy, and participation in agricultural decision-making continue to limit adoption. The article warns that without stronger coordination between agritech platforms, public digital infrastructure, and government-led inclusion efforts, AI could reinforce rather than reduce existing inequalities.

The report provides a data-driven snapshot of how early-stage capital is shaping Africa’s innovation ecosystem and finds that both angel networks and individual investors continue to maintain largely sector-agnostic portfolios. However, impact-oriented sectors, and agritech in particular, are increasingly emerging as preferred investment areas, reflecting growing interest in ventures that combine commercial potential with measurable development outcomes.

This shift is also driving the creation of more specialised investment communities. One example is the Climate Smart Agriculture Network established by ABAN, designed to strengthen investor expertise and improve support for early-stage startups operating in agriculture and climate-related sectors.

The report also highlights the expanding role of smaller early-stage transactions. While funding rounds between USD 1 million and USD 20 million continue to represent a substantial share of deployed capital, deals below USD 1 million have grown steadily since 2019. These smaller transactions are often driven by individual angel investors and angel networks willing to back higher-risk opportunities at earlier stages, frequently working alongside venture capital funds, accelerators, incubators and venture studios to help build the next generation of African startups.

The findings suggest that digital advisory delivered through familiar channels such as WhatsApp, alongside AI-enabled financial inclusion models, offers one of the clearest pathways for investment and scale. Digital farm management and agri e-commerce platforms also create value, particularly around farmgate pricing and market forecasting, although standalone apps and web interfaces continue to face adoption barriers linked to trust and usability.

Image credit: GSMA Mobile for Development

The report also highlights emerging opportunities in carbon monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV), product traceability, increasingly driven by European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) requirements, and drone-enabled precision agriculture. However, weak data infrastructure, limited institutional support and high capital requirements continue to constrain adoption, with investment needs often exceeding what startups and smallholder ecosystems can absorb without external financing.

Indonesia’s agritech ecosystem remains highly active, with startups, academia and public-sector initiatives continuing to experiment with digital agriculture models. Companies including Elevarm, Eratani, Pandawa Agri, JALA, Banyu and Rize, many with AI-enabled offerings, have recently attracted investment.

Smallholder farmers account for an estimated 25.6 million households, representing 90% of Indonesia’s 28.4 million agricultural households, while agriculture contributes around 14% of national GDP.

Apollo Agriculture and Kaleidofin mark breakthrough in smallholder agritech finance

Apollo Agriculture, an agri-fintech operating in Kenya and other African markets, and fintech Kaleidofin have completed Kenya’s first private-sector local-currency securitisation in smallholder agriculture. This is a financing structure that bundles thousands of smallholder farmer loans into an investable product for external investors, denominated in Kenyan shillings rather than foreign currency.

The initiative has mobilised KES 276 million (approximately USD 2.1 million) in financing across a portfolio of 23,839 smallholder farmers, 51% of whom are women and 22% first-time borrowers. It is backed by the IDH Farmfit Fund as anchor investor. Supporting partners include FSD Africa, the MOBILIST programme, and British International Investment (BII), which provided technical assistance to Apollo Agriculture through BII Plus.

Photo credit: Apollo Agriculture

The transaction was enabled through Kaleidofin’s financing platform, which uses AI-driven risk analysis and farmer data to help structure and assess agricultural loan portfolios. The financing was provided in Kenyan shillings rather than dollars, helping protect farmers from currency fluctuations that can increase repayment costs.

The deal is the first step in a multi-year securitisation programme eventually targeting KES 2.37 billion (USD 18.3 million) in mobilised financing and more than 130,000 farmers over time. Interestingly, Pan-African Rating Agency Agusto & Co assigned an investment-grade BBB rating to the issuance, marking an important milestone in demonstrating the creditworthiness of smallholder agriculture as an asset class.

Apollo is one of the agritech “scaleups” in Africa. Established in 2016, the company has served over 400,000 farmers. To date, Apollo has raised a total of approximately USD 67.8 million across multiple funding rounds.

Why it matters

This is a one-of-a-kind example in Africa of an agritech scaleup now working with partners to convert smallholder farmer loans into a rated investment product for external investors. It presents a new pathway for scaling inclusive smallholder finance through technology-driven risk analysis, backed by deep agricultural value-chain expertise with investor confidence.

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13/05/26

FarmRise hits 5 million users as Bayer scales phygital agriculture

A recent article by The Economic Times of India highlights the latest milestones in Bayer’s digital agriculture strategy, with its FarmRise app now reaching more than 5 million registered farmers across India. The app brings together agronomy advice, local weather updates, mandi (middleman) prices, government schemes and crop-specific content through a platform available in more than nine Indian languages, designed for accessibility and ease of use.

The app embeds an AI chatbot launched in 2025 that provides instant responses to crop- and farm-related queries in simple language. Its anti-counterfeit scanning capability has recorded more than 10 million scans, allowing farmers to verify product authenticity directly through the app. In addition, Bayer leverages a tool called Alivio to deliver plot-level insights and weather risk protection for farmers.

At the centre of Bayer’s strategy is its “phygital” Direct2Farmer (D2F) ecosystem, combining digital services with on-the-ground engagement. The model includes FarmRise One, a marketplace integrated with field operations that supports more than 500 Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) and over 200,000 farmers, connecting users to agricultural inputs, credit services and market access opportunities. The approach reflects a broader agritech shift where scale increasingly depends on combining digital capabilities with trusted field networks.

FarmRise One Ecosystem

Image credit: Bayer AG

Why it matters

FarmRise reinforces the growing importance of “phygital” models, where digital tools and field engagement work together to drive adoption at scale. It also raises an important question: how will large private-sector ecosystems coexist with emerging national agricultural digital public infrastructure (Agri-DPI) initiatives?

Wadhwani AI expands into agroforestry with new AI partnership in India

Indian nonprofit Wadhwani AI has signed an MoU with India’s Central Agroforestry Research Institute (ICAR-CAFRI) to explore the use of AI for sustainable agroforestry across the country’s different agro-climatic zones. The partnership will focus on developing AI-powered tools to support monitoring, planning and field interventions related to agroforestry and natural resource management.

Photo credit: Wadhwani AI

The initiative expands Wadhwani AI’s agriculture portfolio beyond crop advisory and pest management into broader land and ecosystem management use cases. The organisation has previously developed specialised tools like CottonAce, an AI-powered pest detection solution for cotton farmers, and more recently AgriVaani, a multilingual advisory chatbot for farmers and extension workers. Across its agriculture solutions, Wadhwani AI reports reaching more than 1 million farmers, while its Krishi Saathi platform has resolved over 279,000 farmer queries across multiple states.

The move reflects a broader shift in agricultural AI, from farm-level productivity and advisory use cases toward applications supporting climate resilience, land management and ecosystem planning.

Why it matters

The announcement highlights the growing importance of AI tools focused on ecosystem management and climate resilience, expanding beyond traditional crop advisory use cases. It also reinforces the increasing role of locally trained AI systems embedded within research institutions and national agricultural ecosystems.

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13/05/26

VunaPay shares impact figures after 3 years of operations

VunaPay, a Kenyan agritech-fintech focused on cooperative digitisation and farmer payments, has shared new impact figures as it marks three years of operations. The company says it has onboarded 197 agricultural cooperatives, impacted more than 130,000 smallholder farmers and accelerated over KES 1.3 billion (approximately USD 10 million) in payouts since launch.

The figures highlight momentum around embedded fintech infrastructure models in African agriculture, particularly those focused on digitising cooperative operations and accelerating farmer payments. Delayed payouts and inefficient cooperative processes remain major operational challenges across many agricultural value chains in Africa, directly affecting farmer liquidity and cash flow.

Why it matters

VunaPay’s trajectory highlights the growing importance of embedded fintech in African agriculture. As agritech matures, some of the strongest scaling opportunities are increasingly around payments, liquidity and cooperative digitisation.

11/05/26

Good Reads: GSMA identifies AI use cases with potential to scale among Indonesia’s farmers

A new GSMA report examines how AI is improving agricultural advisory services, financial inclusion and market access for smallholder farmers in Indonesia. Based on 200 interviews and field testing across Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Aceh and Bali, the study identifies three AI applications combining the strongest impact potential with near-term scalability: conversational agricultural advisory, AI-enabled alternative credit scoring and AI-driven price prediction and market intelligence.

The findings suggest that digital advisory delivered through familiar channels such as WhatsApp, alongside AI-enabled financial inclusion models, offers one of the clearest pathways for investment and scale. Digital farm management and agri e-commerce platforms also create value, particularly around farmgate pricing and market forecasting, although standalone apps and web interfaces continue to face adoption barriers linked to trust and usability.

Image credit: GSMA Mobile for Development

The report also highlights emerging opportunities in carbon monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV), product traceability, increasingly driven by European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) requirements, and drone-enabled precision agriculture. However, weak data infrastructure, limited institutional support and high capital requirements continue to constrain adoption, with investment needs often exceeding what startups and smallholder ecosystems can absorb without external financing.

Indonesia’s agritech ecosystem remains highly active, with startups, academia and public-sector initiatives continuing to experiment with digital agriculture models. Companies including Elevarm, Eratani, Pandawa Agri, JALA, Banyu and Rize, many with AI-enabled offerings, have recently attracted investment.

Smallholder farmers account for an estimated 25.6 million households, representing 90% of Indonesia’s 28.4 million agricultural households, while agriculture contributes around 14% of national GDP.

12/05/26

Good Reads: AgriTech a leading focus for Africa’s angel investors, new ABAN survey finds

The new 2025 Angel Investment Survey Report published by the African Business Angel Network (ABAN) in partnership with market intelligence firm Briter Intelligence highlights agriculture and agritech as increasingly prominent investment priorities across Africa’s early-stage funding landscape. Agritech ranks as the top sector choice for angel networks (20%) and the second most popular for individual angel investors (13%).

The report provides a data-driven snapshot of how early-stage capital is shaping Africa’s innovation ecosystem and finds that both angel networks and individual investors continue to maintain largely sector-agnostic portfolios. However, impact-oriented sectors, and agritech in particular, are increasingly emerging as preferred investment areas, reflecting growing interest in ventures that combine commercial potential with measurable development outcomes.

This shift is also driving the creation of more specialised investment communities. One example is the Climate Smart Agriculture Network established by ABAN, designed to strengthen investor expertise and improve support for early-stage startups operating in agriculture and climate-related sectors.

The report also highlights the expanding role of smaller early-stage transactions. While funding rounds between USD 1 million and USD 20 million continue to represent a substantial share of deployed capital, deals below USD 1 million have grown steadily since 2019. These smaller transactions are often driven by individual angel investors and angel networks willing to back higher-risk opportunities at earlier stages, frequently working alongside venture capital funds, accelerators, incubators and venture studios to help build the next generation of African startups.

In Ghana, Vitara partnered with MTN Ghana to integrate the telco’s mobile money service MoMo API into its TreeSyt platform, enabling real-time payments between buyers, agents and smallholder shea farmers alongside financial literacy training and rollout of mobile wallets.

Image credit: AdomOnline.com

The report highlights that through the partnership Vitara was able to support digital payments, savings and offer microloans for women farmers who make up for 90% of the suppliers. Through the partnership 54,000 additional users were onboarded.

In Pakistan, Crop2X partnered with Telenor Pakistan to deliver satellite-based crop advisory services via SMS, allowing farmers to access recommendations without standalone apps. The partnership helped Crop2X more than triple its user base within months, while giving Telenor a data-driven agricultural service to strengthen engagement across its rural customer base.

Founded in 2020, Vitara digitises shea sourcing through agent-enabled farmer registration, transaction capture and traceability for international buyers, and is backed by impact investor Acumen. Founded in 2021, Crop2X provides remote-sensing-based insights on crop health, soil conditions and yield optimisation delivered through mobile interfaces. Both startups are former grantees of the GSMA Innovation Fund for Climate Resilience and Adaptation 2.0.

Why it matters:

Several mobile operators globally, from Telenor to Safaricom to Dialog Axiata, have long delivered agricultural value-added services to rural customers, either directly or through partnerships with agritech providers. While there is no single recipe for success, the benefits of these collaborations are increasingly evident. This new evidence helps strengthen the case for operators seeking to grow their rural customer base and loyalty through deeper engagement in agritech services.

Bangladesh’s iFarmer raises $1.5M to scale input distribution and market access

Bangladesh-based agritech iFarmer has secured USD 1.5 million in foreign funding from Symbiotics, a Switzerland-based platform for impact investment. The financing will help cover day-to-day operating costs, allowing the company to expand distribution of agricultural inputs and strengthen farmers’ access to markets across Bangladesh.

Established in 2019, iFarmer is a full-stack agriculture startup enabling smallholders to access agricultural inputs, financing, advisory services and markets through an integrated digital model. As previously reported by ArisTechia, in 2024 iFarmer received investment from UK-based VC firm Razor Capital. The startup leverages several partnerships with financial service providers in Bangladesh to provide financial amd insurance services to farmers.

Photo credit: iFarmer

The company has expanded its digital tools in recent years. Its main farmer-facing solution is the Folon app, which provides personalised crop advice, connects farmers with agricultural experts, and gives access to loans. iFarmer also offers a dedicated retailer app that helps input dealers manage supply and orders, as well as an Investor app that connects funders directly to agricultural production cycles. The company leverages a network of more than 1,200 iFarmer Centers to provide services and digital support and onboarding through partnerships with agri-input retailers and traders that act as local service points for farmers.

Agriculture remains central to Bangladesh’s economy, representing an estimated USD 52 billion sector and employing around 40% of the national labour force. The country has roughly 20 million farmers, about 80% of whom are smallholders.

Why it matters
International investment into Bangladeshi agritech remains relatively limited, making Symbiotics’ backing of iFarmer an encouraging signal for the sector. Alongside earlier financing rounds involving Agroshift (USD 1.8 million pre-seed), WeGro (USD 2.8 million seed) and Fashol (USD 1 million pre-seed), the deal suggests gradually increasing external confidence in digital services supporting agricultural distribution, sourcing and finance for Bangladesh’s smallholder farming economy.

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22/04/26

Kenya’s SokoFresh gets $500K to grow Cooling-as-a-Service model

Kenyan agritech company SokoFresh has secured KES 65 million (USD 500,000) in the form of a low-interest loan in local currency from the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) under the Food Systems Innovation Finance Facility, backed by the Bayer Foundation.

The four-year financing will support expansion of its solar-powered cold storage and aggregation services, addressing the key challenge of post-harvest losses for smallholder farmers across horticulture and staple crop value chains. SokoFresh aims to reach 5,000 smallholders per year, contributing to a projected 10% increase in farmer incomes according to a note from Bayer Foundation.

The startup operates under a so-called Cooling-as-a-Service model whereby farmers store produce in mobile solar-powered cold rooms and pay per kilogram per day, lowering the barrier compared with owning refrigeration. At the back end, the company operates a digital market-linkage platform that aggregates volumes and connects farmers with exporters, supermarkets, and wholesalers.

Photo credit: SokoFresh, SNV

Farmers typically access the service through nearby aggregation hubs and field agents, with coordination supported through SMS, enabling storage scheduling, delivery coordination, and participation in structured supply chains without requiring smartphone apps.

Why it matters
It is encouraging to see investment targeting first-mile cold-chain infrastructure, where refrigeration gaps continue to drive post-harvest losses across many markets. Looking ahead, models like SokoFresh (see other story about AkoFresh) could further strengthen their digital layer through deeper mobile-money integration, while also enabling downstream services such as traceability and warehouse-receipt finance.

29/04/26

India’s Prithu raises $1.2M to scale soil carbon MRV for smallholders

India-based climatetech agritech Prithu has raised USD 1.2 million in a seed funding round led by early stage investor Transition VC. The funding will be used to expand its farmer network across additional farming regions in India, strengthen its blockchain-based monitoring platform, and secure international buyers for the carbon credits it generates.

Founded in 2024, Prithu operates a full-stack carbon removal platform focused on nature-based solutions. . The company builds measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) systems that track how farming practices store carbon in soils and turn these results into verified carbon credits.

Photo credit: Prithu

Its solution combines satellite data, soil measurements, and digital monitoring tools to estimate soil organic carbon at farm level and help smallholder farmers participate in emerging carbon markets.

Why it matters
The investment reflects growing momentum around soil carbon MRV infrastructure in India, where Prithu works alongside climate techs like Boomitra and Varaha, which are already working with large numbers of smallholder farmers and issuing carbon credits. While these models have moved beyond pilot projects, the long-term scalability of soil carbon markets remains uncertain, particularly questions remain around measurement accuracy, how long carbon stays stored in soils, and stable demand from buyers.

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29/04/26

Ghana’s AkoFresh launches mobile cold storage trailer to reduce post-harvest losses

Ghanaian agritech social enterprise AkoFresh has launched a mobile solar-powered cold storage trailer designed to bring cooling services directly to farmers in remote communities. The solution builds on the company’s off-grid cold storage model and aims to reduce spoilage at harvest, when losses are often highest.

According to the company, its solar cold storage systems can extend the shelf life of perishable produce from three to five days to up to 21 days, helping farmers improve prices and reduce waste. AkoFresh reports that its programmes have already reached more than 10,000 people, with farmer incomes increasing by up to 40% in some communities.

Why it matters
Mobile cold-chain solutions are emerging as a practical way to address one of the biggest constraints in African food systems: first-mile storage. Alongside models such as SokoFresh’s cooling-as-a-service platforms (see other story in this issue), solutions like AkoFresh’s suggest growing momentum behind distributed refrigeration infrastructure as a foundation for stronger market access and value-chain integration.

16/04/26

EAC and AGRA envision digital agriculture corridor for East Africa

The East African Community (EAC), a regional intergovernmental organisation, together with African agriculture development organisation AGRA, has launched an ambitious 10-year Regional Agri-Food Systems Investment Plan (RASIP) for 2026–2035. The USD 15 billion programme aims to strengthen food systems across a region of about 300 million people.

The USD 15 billion figure reflects a regional investment mobilisation target, with one key element of the plan being the creation of a regional corridor to improve farmers’ access to weather information, market prices, and advisory services across borders via mobile platforms.

The plan also includes cross-border agri-industrial parks, stronger seed systems, soil improvement programmes, and regional credit guarantees to attract private investment. It sets targets to reduce post-harvest losses from about 40% to 15%, increase regional agricultural trade by 50%, and support around 25 million farming households.

Rather than building separate national platforms, the corridor approach aims to connect advisory services, climate information, and market data across countries.

If implemented, this would represent one of the more ambitious attempts to develop shared regional digital infrastructure for agriculture in Africa, with similarities to emerging national approaches around agricultural digital public infrastructure (DPI). At the same time, translating regional coordination frameworks into operational cross-border services has historically proved difficult, and much will depend on implementation capacity at country level.

Why it matters

The shift from fragmented national pilots toward interoperable regional systems is a very welcome development. But the success of such corridor models will depend on whether they move beyond policy alignment to deliver shared data and infrastructure that farmers and service providers can actually use.

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15/04/26

Good reads: GSMA report highlights role of mobile operators as scaling partners for agritech platforms

A recent report from GSMA provides new details on how partnerships between mobile operators and agritech startups are supporting the expansion of digital value-chain infrastructure across emerging markets. The report features case studies about Vitara in Ghana and Crop2X in Pakistan, showing how these startups are leveraging mobile operator APIs, distribution channels and mobile-money rails to strengthen their value proposition and reach farmers in the last-mile at scale.

In Ghana, Vitara partnered with MTN Ghana to integrate the telco’s mobile money service MoMo API into its TreeSyt platform, enabling real-time payments between buyers, agents and smallholder shea farmers alongside financial literacy training and rollout of mobile wallets.

Image credit: AdomOnline.com

The report highlights that through the partnership Vitara was able to support digital payments, savings and offer microloans for women farmers who make up for 90% of the suppliers. Through the partnership 54,000 additional users were onboarded.

In Pakistan, Crop2X partnered with Telenor Pakistan to deliver satellite-based crop advisory services via SMS, allowing farmers to access recommendations without standalone apps. The partnership helped Crop2X more than triple its user base within months, while giving Telenor a data-driven agricultural service to strengthen engagement across its rural customer base.

Founded in 2020, Vitara digitises shea sourcing through agent-enabled farmer registration, transaction capture and traceability for international buyers, and is backed by impact investor Acumen. Founded in 2021, Crop2X provides remote-sensing-based insights on crop health, soil conditions and yield optimisation delivered through mobile interfaces. Both startups are former grantees of the GSMA Innovation Fund for Climate Resilience and Adaptation 2.0.

Why it matters:
Several mobile operators globally, from Telenor to Safaricom to Dialog Axiata, have long delivered agricultural value-added services to rural customers, either directly or through partnerships with agritech providers. While there is no single recipe for success, the benefits of these collaborations are increasingly evident. This new evidence helps strengthen the case for operators seeking to grow their rural customer base and loyalty through deeper engagement in agritech services.

India’s Aquapulse raises $2.8M to scale aquaculture services for smallholder shrimp farmers

India-based Aquapulse has raised INR 250 million (about USD 2.8 million) in a Series A round led by NABVENTURES, the venture growth equity fund of NABARD (India’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development), through the AgriSURE Fund. The funding will support expansion of its integrated aquaculture ecosystem across eastern India, scaling its farmer network from more than 6,000 to 15,000 producers across Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, alongside investments in processing infrastructure and technology upgrades.

Image credit: Aquapulse

Aquapulse currently works with more than 6,000 shrimp farmers and plans to expand to 15,000 across eastern India. Its platform combines pond-level monitoring with grading, logistics and compliance systems, helping smallholder producers connect to export markets from which they are often structurally excluded.

Founded in 2022, the company provides water-quality monitoring, disease-risk alerts and feed optimisation tools at farm level while integrating post-harvest handling and traceability required for participation in export-oriented seafood supply chains.

Why it matters

The investment reflects growing interest in “pond-to-port” aquaculture models that connect smallholder producers with export markets and address fragmentation in India’s shrimp sector, where productivity, quality compliance and market access remain uneven.

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10/04/26

Wadhwani AI pilots AgriVaani multilingual advisory chatbot for farmers and extension workers

Indian nonprofit Wadhwani AI has started piloting a multilingual conversational chatbot, AgriVaani, designed to support both farmers and extension workers with locally grounded agricultural advice delivered via voice-enabled interfaces.

The pilot is currently underway in Indore and Lucknow using a train-the-trainer deployment model, in which partner organisations prepare field facilitators before rolling out the tool to farmers.

Photo credit: Wadhwani AI

AgriVaani provides voice-enabled, multilingual recommendations built on Indian datasets and expert knowledge systems. This reflects a broader shift in agricultural AI development away from generic chatbot architectures toward locally trained advisory systems aligned with national data ecosystems and crop-specific decision contexts.

The pilot builds on Wadhwani AI’s earlier agriculture portfolio, including pest and disease detection tools such as CropAce and advisory support systems like Krishi Saathi, which has already resolved more than 279,000 farmer queries through call-centre integration across multiple states. Across its agriculture solutions, the organisation reports reaching over one million farmers through AI-enabled advisory tools.

In 2023, Wadhwani AI received a USD 3.3 million grant from Google.org, the Big Tech’s philanthropic arm. The funding is part of a USD 25 million open call that Google.org launched for organisations using AI to accelerate progress on the SDGs.

Why it matters

Locally trained AI systems aligned with national data ecosystems offer a major opportunity to augment extension workers (rather than replacing them) and can strengthen farmer support at scale.

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10/04/26

Tanzania’s Kilimo Fresh joins Madica pre-seed cohort with up to $200K investment

Tanzania-based agritech startup Kilimo Freshhas secured up to USD 200,000 in pre-seed funding from Madica, an investment programme backed by early-stage investor Flourish Ventures, alongside participation in an 18-month founder support programme.

Kilimo Fresh aggregates fresh produce from smallholder farmers and supplies urban buyers through a technology-enabled distribution network that includes cleaning, sorting, packaging and delivery services. Kilimo Fresh plans to use the investment and support to enhance its software and AI-enabled systems that improve coordination and efficiency across fresh-produce value chains.

Photo credit: Kilimo Fresh

Founded in 2018, the company works to improve farmer market access while reducing post-harvest losses across fragmented horticulture value chains. The agritech claims to offer farmers prices that are 20% higher than those offered by middlemen.

The investment forms part of a USD 600,000 deployment across three African startups, with Kilimo Fresh selected alongside Kenya’s legaltech Hakimu and Nigeria’s health tech Biovana. Each company receives capital plus mentorship, executive coaching and exposure to Madica’s global investor network.

13/04/26

Ghana pilots parametric crop insurance under HAPPY programme with ignitia and WRMS Global

A parametric crop insurance pilot has been launched in Northern Ghana under the Harnessing Agricultural Productivity and Prosperity for Youth Programme (HAPPY) initiative, with non-profit TechnoServe working alongside weather forecasting company Ignitia and WRMS Global.

The pilot introduces index-based insurance designed to trigger payouts automatically when rainfall conditions fall outside predefined thresholds, reducing assessment delays common in conventional crop insurance schemes. Importantly, the inclusion of parametric insurance makes climate-risk protection integral to wider extension and value-chain support rather than a standalone service.

The initiative sits within the broader HAPPY programme, a four-year USD 61 million effort supported by Mastercard Foundation and implemented by partners including TechnoServe and Agri-Impact Limited to create 326,000 jobs for young people across poultry, rice, soybean and tomato value chains.

Why it matters

Parametric insurance rarely scales on its own. Evidence from Pula Advisors and OKO Finance shows uptake improves when bundled with inputs, advisory, or value-chain support. The HAPPY pilot follows this approach by embedding climate-risk protection within a broader agricultural programme.

13/04/26

SunCulture delivers parametric insurance payouts to PAYG irrigation farmers in Kenya

Kenya-based agritech SunCulture has completed the first payout cycle of its parametric climate insurance programme for farmers using its pay-as-you-go (PAYG) irrigation systems, marking an operational step in embedding climate risk protection directly into asset financing models.

Between October and December 2025, 1,738 farmers received automatic payouts totalling about USD 15,000 after drought conditions were confirmed using satellite data. Instead of requiring claims submissions, payouts were triggered automatically and applied to reduce farmers’ outstanding irrigation equipment loan balances, easing repayment pressure during the affected season.

Coverage expanded by 152% over the period, with drought triggers calibrated at constituency level to reflect local climate variability. The programme is implemented with Humanity Insured, APA Insurance and climate insurance specialist IBISA Network, with expansion to Uganda planned for 2026.

In September 2025, SunCulture received a USD 5 million investment from WaterEquity’s Water & Climate Resilience Fund, highlighting rising investor interest in irrigation as climate adaptation infrastructure.

The rollout highlights a broader shift from standalone parametric insurance products toward embedded climate-risk protection integrated into bundled irrigation, finance and advisory services for smallholder farmers.

Why it matters

Bundling parametric insurance with irrigation asset financing shows how climate-risk protection can support adoption of productive technologies while reducing repayment risk. This approach may offer a more scalable pathway than standalone crop insurance in smallholder farming systems.

02/04/26

Analysis: New report highlights widening gap between agritech potential and investment in South and Southeast Asia

A new report by consulting firm Beanstalk AgTech and market intelligence company Briter, supported by Rabo Foundation, International Finance Corporation, FMO and Omnivore, highlights a widening gap between agritech’s economic potential and current investment momentum across thirteen countries in South and Southeast Asia (excluding India).

While agritech adoption could generate more than USD 90 billion in additional annual GDP by 2033, investment across the region fell by nearly 70% between 2022 and 2025, reflecting investor uncertainty about which business models can scale sustainably despite continued demand for digital agriculture solutions.

The report finds that many early agritech ventures continue to face logistics complexity, thin margins and limited expansion opportunities across fragmented smallholder systems. It also identifies the main constraint at the Seed-to-Series A transition, where fewer companies progress to later funding rounds. Development finance institutions are therefore expected to remain central to early-stage market formation, with blended finance combining equity, credit and concessional capital continuing to underpin agritech investment.

The innovation gradient across regional ecosystems

Source: Beanstalk AgTech, Briter

Another key finding concerns the difficulty of regional scale-up. While in Africa commonalities in language, donor ecosystems and agricultural market structures are enabling a growing number of agritechs to expand across borders, South and Southeast Asia remain highly fragmented. Differences in policy regimes, value-chain structures and farm organisation mean that approaches successful in markets such as Vietnam or Indonesia often require substantial redesign before entering neighbouring countries. Scaling depends primarily on a high degree of country-specific adaptation rather than regional rollout strategies.

In terms of emerging opportunity areas, the report finds that investment is increasingly concentrating on traceability-driven digital value chains, embedded agricultural finance linked to procurement systems, and aquaculture.

While agritech adoption could generate more than USD 90 billion in additional annual GDP by 2033, investment across the region fell by nearly 70% between 2022 and 2025, reflecting investor uncertainty about which business models can scale sustainably despite continued demand for digital agriculture solutions.

The report finds that many early agritech ventures continue to face logistics complexity, thin margins and limited expansion opportunities across fragmented smallholder systems. It also identifies the main constraint at the Seed-to-Series A transition, where fewer companies progress to later funding rounds. Development finance institutions are therefore expected to remain central to early-stage market formation, with blended finance combining equity, credit and concessional capital continuing to underpin agritech investment.

The innovation gradient across regional ecosystems

Source: Beanstalk AgTech, Briter

Another key finding concerns the difficulty of regional scale-up. While in Africa commonalities in language, donor ecosystems and agricultural market structures are enabling a growing number of agritechs to expand across borders, South and Southeast Asia remain highly fragmented. Differences in policy regimes, value-chain structures and farm organisation mean that approaches successful in markets such as Vietnam or Indonesia often require substantial redesign before entering neighbouring countries. Scaling depends primarily on a high degree of country-specific adaptation rather than regional rollout strategies.

In terms of emerging opportunity areas, the report finds that investment is increasingly concentrating on traceability-driven digital value chains, embedded agricultural finance linked to procurement systems, and aquaculture.