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.

Zambia launches national climate advisory service with support from TomorrowNow

Zambia has launched a national Digital Climate Advisory Service (DCAS), led by the Zambia Meteorological Department (ZMD) in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture and partners including TomorrowNow, the non-profit climatetech originating from software company Tomorrow.io, and the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO).

DCAS marks a shift from forecasts toward decision-oriented climate guidance supporting farm-level decisions such as planting timing, crop management and responses to increasingly variable rainfall. As of March 2026, more than 34,000 smallholder farmers are already receiving twice weekly advisories.

ZMD is leading development and delivery of the service, putting in place the data pipelines, delivery channels and partnerships needed to expand climate advisory support over time.

TomorrowNow is supporting this work by translating weather and agricultural data into decision ready guidance embedded within national systems. The company also leverages its partnership with Google.org, including integration of Google DeepMind’s WeatherNext models, to generate localised forecasts for farm level advisories.

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Why it matters: Another encouraging signal of collaboration between weather intelligence providers and national meteorological agencies to build local capacity and integrate climate advisory services into national delivery systems.

26/03/26

Kenya publishes draft policy to coordinate national digital agriculture infrastructure

Kenya has released a draft Agricultural Data, Information and Digital Policy under the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development to strengthen coordination of agricultural data systems and digital service delivery across the sector.

Source: KADIC (LinkedIn video)

A central component of the framework is the proposed establishment of the Kenya Agricultural Digital Information Centre (KADIC), which would oversee sector data governance, coordinate digital agriculture programmes and support innovation across national and county governments.

The policy builds on the Kenya Integrated Agriculture Management Information System (KIAMIS), a national digital public infrastructure initiated in 2019 and formally handed over by the Food and Agriculture Organization to the Government of Kenya in November 2025. KIAMIS had registered more than 6.5 million farmers by mid-2025 and over 7.2 million by 2026, supporting delivery of input subsidy programmes as well as access to advisory services, markets and finance.

The draft framework proposes stronger interoperability between farmer registries, extension platforms, market information systems and geospatial monitoring tools, and encourages the use of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things sensors, drones and blockchain to support traceability, productivity and farm level decision making. It also places digital public infrastructure at the centre of efforts to integrate agricultural datasets held by public agencies, research institutions and private service providers.

Agriculture contributes around 22 percent of Kenya’s GDP and supports more than 70 percent of rural livelihoods.

Why it matters

The proposed creation of KADIC signals a shift toward institutional coordination of digital agriculture systems at national level, positioning farmer registries and advisory platforms as core components of agricultural digital public infrastructure.

31/03/26

IFC backs Ethiopia’s Lersha with $1M to scale agrifinance services

Ethiopian agritech Lersha has secured USD 1 million from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) through a convertible loan, its first institutional investment.

The funding will support the expansion of Lersha’s agrifinance model, enabling the company to scale bundled access to inputs, mechanisation and advisory services alongside seasonal credit for smallholders.

Convertible loans are typically structured as short-term debt that can later convert into equity, allowing investors to provide growth capital while retaining the option to participate in the company’s future upside.

Photo credit: Lersha

Founded in 2018, Lersha operates a phy-gital service platform that has reached more than 300,000 farmers and plans to expand its reach to one million by 2030. The company combines digital farmer profiling with agent-led service delivery and works with national partners, including the Agricultural Transformation Institute (ATI) and the Ethiopian Agricultural Businesses Corporation (EABC), to support fertiliser recommendations, mechanisation access and integrated input distribution.

Why it matters: This investment is another signal of the shift in African agritech funding toward platforms that have finance at the core alongside inputs, mechanisation and advisory services. As highlighted by recent Briter analysis, companies integrating financial services account for over 60% of sector funding despite representing only about a quarter of firms. In Ethiopia, Lersha is emerging as a key enabler linking farmer profiling with credit, inputs and mechanisation delivery at scale.

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20/03/2026

India issues 91.7 million farmer IDs under Digital Agriculture Mission

India has generated more than 91.7 million farmer IDs under its Digital Agriculture Mission as of March 2026, marking continued rollout of AgriStack as a national digital public infrastructure for agriculture built on three foundational registries: geo-referenced village maps, crop sown registry and the farmers registry.

Approved in September 2024 with a budget of INR28.17 billion (approximately USD 298 million at current exchange rates), the mission is building interoperable registries linking farmers, crops and georeferenced village maps as a unified reference system supporting subsidy delivery, insurance and advisory services.

The Digital Crop Survey has already mapped more than 285 million agricultural plots across 604 districts during the Kharif 2025 season, strengthening visibility of cropping patterns for procurement planning, production estimates and input logistics.

The programme also includes the Krishi Decision Support System (Krishi DSS), which integrates satellite imagery, soil, crop and weather data into a national geospatial advisory platform, alongside a nationwide soil resource mapping effort covering 39.1 million hectares.

Why it matters

Following earlier policy approvals in 2024 and the Digital Agriculture Mission 2.0 roadmap released in 2025, the scale of farmer ID issuance and plot-level crop mapping suggests India’s agricultural data infrastructure is moving from strategy toward operational deployment at national scale.

30/03/26

AfDB commits $8.5M to Breega Africa Seed I fund targeting early-stage agritech startups

The African Development Bank Group has committed USD 8.5 million to the Breega Africa Seed I Fund, which invests in early-stage startups across sectors including agritech, climate tech, fintech and logistics.

The commitment includes USD 5.7 million in equity and USD 2.8 million in first-loss capital under the Boost Africa initiative, helping de-risk seed-stage investment across African markets.

The fund will invest pre-seed and seed tickets of USD 100,000 to USD 2 million across key markets such as Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, South Africa and Francophone Africa.

Why it matters
The investment highlights the growing role of development finance institutions in supporting early-stage agritech pipelines through venture funds, particularly as private capital for smallholder-focused agritech (“on-farm solutions”) continues to decline.

The study, which draws on data from the AgBase platform, shows that total investment fell to just under USD 170 million, down around 20% from USD 200 million in 2024, while the number of deals declined by about 10%.

The sharpest drop was in on-farm solutions targeting smallholder farmers. In contrast, pre-farm (e.g. inputs, biotech), post-farm (processing, storage, logistics) and retail segments (distribution and delivery) all saw increased funding.

Source: AgBase 2026

What this shows is that while most deals are still in on-farm solutions (around 50%), often backed by grants, most of the money is going elsewhere. Larger funding is flowing into logistics, aggregation, marketplaces and infrastructure models that can absorb bigger tickets. Much of this is driven by debt financing in production and transport, pointing to a shift toward more asset-heavy businesses with clearer, more predictable revenues.

The importance of embedding financial services

Around a quarter of agritech companies now embed financial services, including payments, credit, insurance and equipment leasing, into their core offering. While they represent roughly 25% of companies, they account for over 60% of total funding.

This reflects a broader shift: the main constraint to scaling agriculture in Africa is often not technology, but access to working capital and financial services. As a result, capital is moving toward models that integrate financing with operations, particularly in downstream segments such as marketplaces, aggregation and logistics.

Concentration remains, but geography is widening

Funding remains highly concentrated. Since 2016, just 12 companies (fewer than 2% of the total) have raised over USD 50 million each and captured more than half of all agritech funding. These are primarily based in Kenya, Egypt and Nigeria, with companies such as Apollo Agriculture and Pula among the most prominent.

At the same time, the geographic spread is evolving. Kenya’s share of funding fell from over 50% in 2023–24 to around 25% in 2025, with capital spreading to markets such as Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa and Tunisia.

Source: AgBase 2026

The winner does all dynamic

A small group of scale-ups continues to capture a disproportionate share of funding. Between 2016 and 2025, just 12 companies raising over USD 50 million accounted for more than half of total agritech investment, including players such as Pula, SunCulture, Twiga Foods and Apollo Agriculture.

These companies typically follow integrated models, combining inputs, logistics, marketplaces and fintech, and are increasingly positioned as finance- and infrastructure-led platforms rather than pure technology plays.

Outcomes, however, have been mixed. Capital alone has not guaranteed resilience: those that have endured built sustainable margins, controlled costs and aligned their capital structure with asset-heavy operations, while others expanded faster than their economics allowed.

AgBase is an initiative of Briter backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and implemented in partnership with Mercy Corps AgriFin.

Verdant Impact raises $3M to scale AI-driven livestock solution

Indian agritech startup Verdant Impact has raised USD3 million in seed funding led by VC Unicorn India Ventures, to scale its digital agriculture solution Pashu.AI, strengthen R&D and expand across new regions in the country.

Founded in 2020, Verdant Impact is an AI- and IoT-driven precision genetics company that builds integrated digital solutions for sustainable dairy systems. At the core of its model is Pashu.AI, which provides multilingual AI advisory for crop management, livestock care, disease detection and real-time market insights, available in more than 20 Indian languages.

Image credit: Verdant Impact

The platform enables farmers to monitor livestock health, improve breeding decisions and manage herds using real-time data, supported by IoT-enabled tools for continuous tracking. Verdant Impact reports having served over 600,000 farmers to date and is targeting approximately USD 12 million revenue by 2026.

Why it matters
Solutions like Pashu.AI go offer unique value because they go beyond basic advisory, supporting health diagnostics, nutrition management and breeding decisions through real-time data and AI models.

The fact that the platform operates in more than 20 Indian languages shows a focus on usability and farmer adoption. The key question is whether this level of scientific precision can consistently translate into trusted, yet simple and actionable on-farm dvisory at scale.

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14/03/26

WayCool raises $22.5M to strengthen supply chain and FMCG pivot

Indian agritech startup WayCool has raised INR2.1 billion (USD 22.5 million) from impact investor Lightrock, marking its first significant equity round in nearly four years.

Founded in 2015, WayCool operates a full-stack “soil-to-sale” platform, connecting over 85,000 farmers to retailers and institutional buyers. The company spans sourcing, distribution and food processing, and sells products under brands such as Madhuram and KitchenJi.

The funding comes after a period of restructuring, including layoffs and leadership changes. In FY23, WayCool reported revenue of around USD 150 million but loss were at around USD 82 million), highlighting the challenges of scaling supply chain-led agritech models.

In response, the company has been shifting toward higher-margin segments, particularly FMCG and branded products. The fresh capital is expected to support this transition, alongside strengthening its supply chain infrastructure.

Why it matters
WayCool’s latest funding reflects broader consolidation in India’s agritech sector, one of the most developed globally. Recent moves, including Arya.ag raising around USD 80 million, AgroStar securing USD 30 million, and the Unnati–Gramophone merger, point to a stronger focus on scale and more sustainable business models. In particular, WayCool’s pivot toward FMCG highlights a wider shift toward downstream, post-farm segments, where margins are higher and revenue streams more predictable.

17/03/26

Lersha and EABC target 1 million Ethiopian farmers with finance, inputs and mechanisation

Ethiopian agritech Lersha and the Ethiopian Agricultural Businesses Corporation (EABC), a federal government public enterprise, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding aimed at reaching 1 million smallholder farmers with access to finance, agricultural inputs and mechanisation services by 2030.

Image credit: Lersha

The partnership combines Lersha’s digital platform with EABC’s machinery and input supply network, enabling service delivery through integrated physical supply chains. It is aligned with national initiatives including the National Agri-Finance Implementation Roadmap (NAFIR), the Digital Agriculture Roadmap (2025–2032) and the National Mechanization Strategy.

Founded in 2018, Lersha uses a phy-gital model connecting 270,000+ smallholder farmers, and 250+ service providers, offering a marketplace for agricultural inputs, mechanization, access to finance, market linkage, agro-climate advisory and fertilizer recommendation through both online and offline solutions. For service delivery, the agritech leverages a network of 2,000+ agents, a call center (7860), and the Lersha digital platform.

Since March 2023, the company has worked with the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Institute (ATI) to develop digital profiles for over one million farmers, enabling fertiliser recommendations and climate-informed advisory.

Why it matters
Ethiopia’s Digital Agriculture Roadmap (2025–2032) places credit and insurance at the centre of its scale-up strategy, but delivery has remained fragmented. By linking farmer data, input supply and mechanisation with financing, this partnership is a test of whether those ambitions can be operationalised into a functioning, end-to-end system at scale.

18/03/26

Ghana launches Timbuktoo AgriTech Hub to scale digital agriculture

Ghana has launched the Timbuktoo AgriTech Hub in Accra, backed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), as part of a broader push to scale digital innovation in agriculture.

The hub is part of the Timbuktoo initiative, a USD 1 billion pan-African programme launched by UNDP in 2024 to support impact-driven, early-stage startups. It aims to mobilise public and private capital to create 10 million jobs and impact 100 million livelihoods, while addressing gaps such as limited early-stage funding, weak incubators and fragmented markets.

The initiative is being rolled out through eight hubs (Accra, Kigali, Lagos and Nairobi) supporting sectors such as fintech, healthtech and agritech. The Ghana hub focuses on agriculture, building on the country’s wider digital agriculture agenda.

The AgriTech Hub brings together partners including 500 Global and Seedstars, and targets challenges such as fragmented supply chains, limited finance and climate risks through mobile technologies, data-driven tools and AI. In practice, the hub will operate as both an innovation and financing platform, offering incubation, access to capital, pan-African networks and capacity-building support.

Why it matters
This reflects a shift from fragmented startup support toward more coordinated, continent-scale innovation platforms. As agritech funding becomes more constrained and innovation spreads across a wider set of markets (see below analysis article), there is a growing need for knowledge sharing, coordination and cross-continental collaboration, besides capital.

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05/03/26

Analysis - African agritech funding slows as capital shifts downstream and toward finance-led models

The new report State of Agtech Investment in Africa 2025 by Briter shows that both total funding and deal activity declined last year, the first such drop since tracking began. This contrasts with the broader African startup ecosystem, where funding and deal flow increased year-on-year, suggesting that agritech has stabilised at a lower baseline.

The study, which draws on data from the AgBase platform, shows that total investment fell to just under USD 170 million, down around 20% from USD 200 million in 2024, while the number of deals declined by about 10%.

The sharpest drop was in on-farm solutions targeting smallholder farmers. In contrast, pre-farm (e.g. inputs, biotech), post-farm (processing, storage, logistics) and retail segments (distribution and delivery) all saw increased funding.

Source: AgBase 2026

What this shows is that while most deals are still in on-farm solutions (around 50%), often backed by grants, most of the money is going elsewhere. Larger funding is flowing into logistics, aggregation, marketplaces and infrastructure models that can absorb bigger tickets. Much of this is driven by debt financing in production and transport, pointing to a shift toward more asset-heavy businesses with clearer, more predictable revenues.

The importance of embedding financial services

Around a quarter of agritech companies now embed financial services, including payments, credit, insurance and equipment leasing, into their core offering. While they represent roughly 25% of companies, they account for over 60% of total funding.

This reflects a broader shift: the main constraint to scaling agriculture in Africa is often not technology, but access to working capital and financial services. As a result, capital is moving toward models that integrate financing with operations, particularly in downstream segments such as marketplaces, aggregation and logistics.

Concentration remains, but geography is widening

Funding remains highly concentrated. Since 2016, just 12 companies (fewer than 2% of the total) have raised over USD 50 million each and captured more than half of all agritech funding. These are primarily based in Kenya, Egypt and Nigeria, with companies such as Apollo Agriculture and Pula among the most prominent.

At the same time, the geographic spread is evolving. Kenya’s share of funding fell from over 50% in 2023–24 to around 25% in 2025, with capital spreading to markets such as Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa and Tunisia.

Source: AgBase 2026

The winner does all dynamic

A small group of scale-ups continues to capture a disproportionate share of funding. Between 2016 and 2025, just 12 companies raising over USD 50 million accounted for more than half of total agritech investment, including players such as Pula, SunCulture, Twiga Foods and Apollo Agriculture.

These companies typically follow integrated models, combining inputs, logistics, marketplaces and fintech, and are increasingly positioned as finance- and infrastructure-led platforms rather than pure technology plays.

Outcomes, however, have been mixed. Capital alone has not guaranteed resilience: those that have endured built sustainable margins, controlled costs and aligned their capital structure with asset-heavy operations, while others expanded faster than their economics allowed.

AgBase is an initiative of Briter backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and implemented in partnership with Mercy Corps AgriFin.

19/03/26

Good reads - FAO examines the state of insurtech in agriculture

A new FAO report Leveraging digital innovation to promote agricultural insurance among small-scale farmers highlights how digital technologies are beginning to transform one of the most underdeveloped segments of rural finance: agricultural insurance.

Despite its importance for climate resilience, coverage remains extremely low. Only around 19% of smallholders globally are insured, with penetration in sub-Saharan Africa below 3%. High costs, weak data systems and limited distribution have long made these products difficult to scale.

The report argues that digital technologies are starting to address these structural constraints, but unevenly. Mobile platforms have already played a key role in reducing distribution costs and enabling bundled models, where insurance is offered alongside inputs, credit or advisory. In Kenya, for example, platforms like DigiFarm integrate insurance from providers such as Pula and ACRE Africa into broader service ecosystems.

Recent tech innovation is focused on data and risk modelling. Satellite imagery, drones and telecom data (e.g. commercial microwave links, or CMLs, which use mobile network signals to measure rainfall) are improving loss assessment and generating more granular weather data, while AI is enhancing risk profiling and pricing.

There are also early examples of farmer-generated data. Picture-based insurance pilots allow farmers to upload images of their fields via mobile apps, improving loss verification and reducing basis risk.

Together, these advances are making agricultural insurance more accurate and affordable. However, scale remains limited. Most models still rely on bundling, partnerships and subsidies, and are concentrated in markets with stronger digital ecosystems like East Africa.

The result is a familiar pattern: strong innovation at the edges, but limited system-wide scale. Closing the insurance gap will require not just better technology, but stronger integration across finance, distribution and public systems.

At stake is not only the future of digital agriculture, but control over what I call the “intelligence layer” of agriculture: the data systems, AI models and algorithms that increasingly guide farming decisions.

As agriculture becomes more data-driven, the actors who control this intelligence layer will shape what crops are grown, how inputs are used and how farming risks are managed.

A structural shift is underway in agriculture. Historically, power in agricultural value chains was concentrated in three places: input suppliers, traders and food processors. Today, a new layer is emerging above them: digital systems that analyse agricultural data and generate recommendations for farmers. This intelligence layer is becoming a critical point of influence in farming systems.

The article references the recent report “Head in the Cloud” by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). The report warns of a “top-down” approach to farming systems in which Big Tech and Big Ag companies increasingly provide farmers with AI-driven decision tools. Supported by both public and private investment, these systems risk effectively outsourcing farmers’ decisions to distant algorithms, with limited accountability.

Examples include digital farm-management platforms that combine satellite and field data to generate recommendations on planting or input use, as well as cloud-based AI systems that guide decisions on crops and farm management.

Image credit: IPES-Food

The risks of farming by algorithm

Consider a farmer in Ethiopia. A digital agriculture tool trained on global datasets may have little or no knowledge of teff, Ethiopia’s most widely consumed grain. Instead, it might recommend crops such as corn, for which extensive global data and agronomic models already exist, often linked to fertilisers and pesticides. In practice, such tools are likely to guide farmers toward crops and practices that reflect global datasets and supply chains rather than local agricultural realities.

This emerging model of “farming by algorithm” risks overlooking local knowledge, crops, and community-based innovation systems. There is a long-standing lesson in digital agriculture: good solutions must build on local knowledge and farming practices, not replace them.

As AI-driven agriculture expands globally through private-sector platforms and Big Tech–Big Ag alliances, questions arise about how these models will shape farming systems, particularly in low-resource LMIC contexts.

Models trained on global datasets can easily embed bias, and the risk of failing to support locally appropriate farming decisions is significant. At the same time, innovations rooted in local knowledge systems often remain undervalued and underfunded compared with large-scale, globally designed technology solutions.

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Building the local data railways for grounded digital agriculture

In this context, the public sector is stepping in to lay the railways of localised and shareable data. The idea is to create national layers of publicly available agricultural data (covering soils, crops, weather and farming systems) that can serve as a shared foundation for AI models powering digital agriculture tools, from startups to research institutions.

Digital public infrastructure (DPI) for agriculture has emerged with the promise of building tools grounded in local realities. Agricultural DPI initiatives are now appearing across multiple countries, with very advanced examples in India, but also in places like Ethiopia, and more emerging initiatives elsewhere such as Côte d’Ivoire.

DPI is not just a technical architecture, it is also a governance tool intended to ensure that the intelligence layer of digital agriculture remains grounded in local ecosystems rather than dictated by global platforms, an approach that increasingly mirrors wider efforts by governments to build sovereign data infrastructures for AI.

The question is how these two major trends, global Big Tech–Big Ag coalitions and locally led agricultural DPIs designed to support innovation grounded in local data, will coexist.

Who controls the intelligence layer?

Global AI models, often trained on a relatively narrow set of crops and production systems, could increasingly shape farming decisions across very different contexts. Whether these systems will meaningfully engage with emerging public agricultural data infrastructures, and under what incentives, remains uncertain.

The IPES-Food report takes a strong stance on the role of Big Tech and large agribusiness firms. Ultimately, however, the debate it raises is less about technology than about power: who controls the intelligence layer of digital agriculture.

Agricultural DPIs may offer countries a pathway to anchor agricultural intelligence in more open and locally grounded data ecosystems. But the existence of a DPI alone does not guarantee that global technology or agribusiness firms will align with these frameworks. Even when they do engage, their scale and resources may give them disproportionate influence over how these systems evolve.

At the same time, most countries are still at a very early stage in building agricultural DPIs. Progress is emerging, but this knowledge infrastructure will take time to reach meaningful scale.

The key question for the coming decade is therefore not simply who builds the most advanced digital tools for farmers. Innovation will come from many directions: Big Techs, agribusinesses and local agritech startups alike.

The deeper question is who governs the intelligence layer on which these tools depend. In other words, who sets the rules, standards and data infrastructures that shape how agricultural knowledge is generated and applied.

In the end, the future of digital agriculture may depend less on who builds the algorithms, and more on who governs the systems that feed them.

TomorrowNow and Google.org back AI-powered weather intelligence in Africa

TomorrowNow, the non-profit climatetech originating from software company Tomorrow.io, has secured USD 1 million in support from Google.org, Google’s charitable foundation, to scale AI-powered actionable agro-meteorological advisories for smallholder farmers across Africa. The funding supports integration of advanced weather forecasting models, expansion of validation infrastructure, and strengthened farmer-centred impact measurement with local delivery institutions.

TomorrowNow will integrate WeatherNext models developed by Google DeepMind into its digital advisory system, the Global Access Platform. These AI-based models process atmospheric data to generate detailed, location-specific forecasts several days ahead. The platform translates these forecasts into practical farming guidance, including planting windows, crop protection timing and preparation for heavy rainfall.

With this support, TomorrowNow will also expand the Gold Standard Validation Network, a growing network of high-quality weather stations across East and Southern Africa that continuously measures model performance in the agro-ecological conditions where farmers operate. Expanding across Kenya, Zambia and Malawi, the network compares forecast outputs with observed conditions to test accuracy and refine advisories.

A further component of the initiative is the strengthening of farmer-impact measurement systems in partnership with Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization, Zambia Meteorological Department and One Acre Fund to assess forecast accuracy, advisory uptake and farmer response under increasing rainfall variability.

TomorrowNow reports reaching more than 6 million farmers across Kenya, Malawi and Zambia, with 98% confirming receipt of weather advisories and 72% reporting that they acted on the guidance.

Why it matters
AI-based weather models are improving the resolution and speed of short-term forecasts, but smallholders need farm-level intelligence that is locally validated and actionable. By combining advanced forecasting with investment in ground weather stations, this initiative addresses a core constraint in Africa: limited observation infrastructure. Reliable, field-tested forecasts are essential for turning predictive capability into practical agricultural decisions.

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26/02/26

Acumen invests in Ghana’s digital shea platform Vitara

More details have emerged on the investment by social impact investor Acumen Acumen in Ghana-based Vitara, formerly known as Sommalife, announced earlier this year. Financial terms were not disclosed. The backing will support scaling market linkage to 60,000 farmers, expanding shea butter processing capacity and fully deploying the company’s digital traceability infrastructure across all operational zones.

Vitara digitises the shea nut and soybean value chains through a B2B model supplying verified, traceable produce to international buyers and brands. Aggregation and digitisation occur via intermediary mobile-enabled agents who register farmers, coordinate procurement, capture transaction data and manage quality control at community level. The company sources from rural communities where 90 percent of suppliers are women farmers.

Its TreeSyt platform tracks crops from farm to buyer and generates real-time supply chain data. To date, 150,000 farmers are registered on TreeSyt, with 40,000 active suppliers. The company targets reaching one million farmers by 2030, integrating traceability, climate resilience and premium market access into routine farming practices.

Image credit: Acumen

Vitara is also a former grantee of the GSMA Innovation Fund for Climate Resilience and Adaptation 2.0, supporting digital innovations that enable vulnerable populations to adapt to climate change and strengthen biodiversity.

Why it matters
Recent ArisTechia coverage shows rising investment in digital value-chain infrastructure across Kenya, India and Sri Lanka. Capital is concentrating on buyer-facing platforms built around aggregation and traceability, suggesting investors see stronger revenue scalability in market-linked systems than in direct-to-farmer app models.

27/02/26

AfDB backs Saviu II startup fund in Francophone West Africa, agritech in focus

The African Development Bank Group has committed USD7.1 million as a limited partner in Saviu II, a venture capital fund investing in early-stage technology startups across Francophone West and Central Africa, including agritech companies. The commitment includes USD4.9 million in equity and USD2.2 million in first-loss capital, backed by the European Commission through the Boost Africa Programme.

Managed by Saviu Partners, the fund plans to invest USD540,000–USD3.3 million in around 20 seed and early-stage startups, with at least 60% of investments targeting Francophone markets including Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Benin and Cameroon.

Why it matters
Venture capital in Africa remains concentrated in a few English-speaking hubs. Startups in Francophone Africa raised about USD450m in 2025, according to Africa: The Big Deal, but early-stage capital remains limited. As sectors such as agritech expand, including companies like OKO Finance, Tolbi and Ignitia, funds such as Saviu II aim to strengthen seed-stage financing across the region.

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28/02/26

AfCFTA and AGRA partner to boost farmer-centred intra-African trade

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) have launched a new partnership aimed at strengthening farmer-centred agricultural trade within Africa. The collaboration focuses on accelerating the practical implementation of the AfCFTA agricultural agenda, including reducing barriers to cross-border agricultural trade and improving coordination between governments, agribusinesses and farmer organisations. By strengthening regional supply chains, the alliance aims to expand market opportunities for African farmers while improving food security and economic resilience.

Why it matters

While this is a trade initiative, deeper regional integration under AfCFTA has important implications for digital agriculture. Trade integration enables digital services that connect farmers, buyers and supply chains across borders, including digital commodity exchanges, traceability systems and other cross-border agritech solutions.

04/03/26

Kenya rolls out electronic central registry for warehouse receipts

Kenya has launched a national Electronic Warehouse Receipt System Central Registry (eWRS-CR) to digitise agricultural commodity trading and expand farmers’ access to finance. The secure, government-owned system automates and centralises warehouse receipts issued under the national Warehouse Receipt System. It was developed by TradeMark Africa, a not-for-profit organisation that works to improve trade infrastructure across Africa, and funded by the British High Commission in Nairobi.

Photo credit: Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry (Kenya)

The system is operated by Kenya’s Warehouse Receipt System Council, the statutory regulator overseeing licensed warehouses and the national warehouse receipt framework. Supported by the Ministry of Investments, Trade and Industry, through the State Department for Trade, the launch is a step in the rollout of a structured and digitised warehouse receipt system.

Commodities stored in certified warehouses can be converted into electronic receipts that can be pledged as collateral for financing, helping strengthen trust in stored commodities as financial assets while improving transparency in agricultural markets.

Why it matters

Warehouse receipts are a key mechanism linking agricultural value chain digitalisation with farmer finance. By turning stored commodities into verifiable collateral, they enable access to working capital. Similar models underpin agritech platforms such as StarAgri and Arya.ag in India, where digital warehouse receipts support collateralised lending and commodity trade.

05/03/26

Gates grants $7M to climate-resilient crop research in LMICs

The Gates Foundation has awarded USD 7 million to Belgian agritech startup Rainbow Crops to accelerate the development of climate-resilient crop varieties for Africa and South Asia.

Rainbow Crops combines AI, multiplex genome editing and automated phenotyping to identify complex genetic traits that improve crop performance under heat and drought stress. The funding will support the company’s Trait Foundry platform, designed to speed up the discovery of traits that are difficult to develop through conventional breeding.

The research will initially focus on three key staple crops (maize, sorghum and rice), which are central to food security in climate-vulnerable regions.

Why it matters

This investment reflects growing interest in AI-driven crop design, where computational tools are used to accelerate plant breeding and identify combinations of genetic traits linked to climate resilience.

As climate pressures intensify across smallholder farming systems, advances in drought- and heat-tolerant crop varieties could play an important role in stabilising yields and strengthening food security in emerging markets.