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.

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.

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.

Drawing on case studies from Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, the report shows that AI in agriculture in LMICs has moved beyond experimentation, with solutions increasingly used to improve yields, detect pests and diseases earlier, and support climate-smart farming practices linked to food security and undernutrition reduction.

In agriculture, the report highlights four initiatives. Digital Green’s FarmerChat operates in India, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, delivering AI-generated agricultural advice via mobile phones. Designed for low-literacy contexts, it supports voice, text, and image inputs and builds on Digital Green’s broader reach of more than 8 million farmers.

The value AI adds to FarmerChat

Image credit: GSMA Mobile for Development

Among active users, around 60% report adopting at least one new farming practice, while the cost of delivering advisory services has fallen by up to 100 times compared with traditional extension.

Lersha, based in Ethiopia, applies AI to link agronomic advice with climate risk management and access to finance, while Varaha, operating mainly in India and South Asia, uses AI and satellite data to automate carbon measurement and verification, enabling smallholders to access carbon markets. The report also highlights the World Bank’s Geo-AI and data-driven agriculture initiatives, which embed AI within national data systems for crop monitoring, climate risk analysis, and policy planning.

Key findings

Across these cases, the evidence suggests AI delivers the greatest impact when it is localised, multimodal (supporting voice, text, and image-based interaction), affordable, and embedded in existing agricultural institutions with humans in the loop. Where these conditions are absent, AI tends to expose deeper structural constraints, underscoring that agricultural transformation through AI remains a socio-technical challenge rather than a purely computational one.

Why it matters

The report shows that AI can work in smallholder agriculture, but only under specific conditions: impact depends less on model performance than on data quality, local grounding, and sustained human involvement. Where these elements are missing, AI does not compensate for structural weaknesses in agricultural systems, it makes them more visible.

Briter’s data indicate that agritech continued to attract a relatively small share of capital compared with fintech and climate-focused infrastructure. In 2025, agritech funding declined further as deal volumes remained broadly stable but total capital fell and median deal sizes compressed. Investors increasingly shifted away from on-farm solutions toward post-farm, value-chain-oriented models such as marketplaces, logistics, processing and warehousing.

Agritech investment trends, 2016-2025

Source: Briter

These asset-heavy, revenue-backed segments accounted for nearly 50% of all agritech funding in 2025, up from just over one-quarter in 2024. This shift has been accompanied by a rise in debt financing to nearly one-third of total capital invested, leaving many early- and mid-stage agritech ventures undercapitalised and reliant on small rounds rather than progressing to growth-stage financing.

Geographically, agritech funding mirrored broader market concentration. South Africa, Kenya, Egypt and Nigeria anchored most deal value in 2025, with Kenya and South Africa particularly prominent. Deals tracked by ArisTechia included Nile’s USD 11.3 million raise and Khula’s USD 6.7 million Series A in South Africa, while in Kenya Pula Foundation raised USD 10.4 million early in the year. The second-largest reported agritech deal in Africa in 2025 was Ghana’s Complete Farmer, which raised USD 10.4 million to scale precision agriculture and market-linkage solutions.

Photo credit: Boston Consulting Group

Despite rapid growth in tools such as SMS advisory services, IVR systems, and digital farmer registries, smallholder adoption remains below 15% globally, while public spending on agricultural digital infrastructure represents just 2% of total agricultural expenditure in OECD countries. The report describes a persistent “strategy-to-delivery gap”, where pilots multiply but scale and impact stall.

Drawing on experience from Ethiopia and India’s Odisha state, PxD and BCG show how DAUs embedded within governments translate roadmaps into costed plans, coordinate actors, and track results. In Odisha, the Krishi Samruddhi programme reaches 7.9 million farmers at USD 0.15 per farmer, cutting severe crop losses by 10% and pest losses by 26%.

The authors estimate digital agriculture could unlock up to USD 500 billion annually in additional agricultural GDP, if governments invest in delivery capacity as seriously as vision.