Digital Agriculture in LMICs - 14 Jun #18
IFC to invest $12M in Omnivore’s fund in India, WeGro bags funding in Bangladesh, highs and lows in Nigeria as Crop2Cash wins award while Tingo faces allegations
08/06/23
Bangladesh’s WeGro secures funding from Accelerating Asia
Bangladeshi agritech WeGro is one of the ten startups, and the only agritech, included in Cohort 8 of Accelerating Asia early-stage VC fund. Established in 2021, WeGro provides end-to-end solutions for farmers connecting them with finance and buyers to sell their produce. The company is planning to use the funds to expand nationwide and impact 200,000 farmers by 2024. Last year, WeGro secured its first investment of USD 100,000 from the Biniyog Briddhi programme’s Impact Ready Matching Fund (IRMF) scheme. Accelerating Asia invests in startups with impact embedded into their core business model with the SDGs as a framework for impact. Accelerating Asia launched Fund II in 2021. Cohort 8 is the fourth batch of investments for Fund II, which will deploy capital across Southeast and South Asia pre-Series A startups. Interested start-ups can apply here to join the next cohort.
09/06/23
Agritech start-up Rize debuts in Indonesia and Vietnam
After being announced in October 2022, Singapore-based agritech start-up Rize has been launched in Indonesia and Vietnam. The start-up is a joint venture of Wavemaker Impact, Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Temasek, and GenZero. Its CEO is Dhruv Sawhney, who previously served as the COO of Indian agritech Nurture.farm a one-stop-shop digital agriculture app that has on-boarded 2.5+ million farmers in India. Rize is an app that helps farmers to identify and implement the most effective strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in rice cultivation. Having piloted in Indonesia and Vietnam, Rize plans to expand to India and additional Southeast Asian markets in the second half of 2023. Rice will see global demand increase by 50% by 2050. According to studies, rice cultivation is the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in agri-food and is responsible for up to 33% of Southeast Asia’s methane emissions.
10/06/23
IFC to invest $12 million in Omnivore’s agritech & climate fund
IFC is considering investing USD 12 million in Omnivore’s Agritech & Climate Sustainability Fund 3, supporting Indian agritech start-ups, according to an IFC disclosure. The Fund will invest in agritech and foodtech companies in India, including companies with operations in India and Southeast Asia. It will focus on investing in farmer platforms and fintech, precision agriculture, B2B agri marketplaces, farm-to-consumer (F2C) brands, agrifood life sciences, and post-harvest technologies. The initiative is expected to be supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Inclusive Agritech Facility. The total fund size is expected to be USD 75 million. Established in 2011, VC Omnivore launched its first and second funds, respectively in 2012 and 2018, and is currently raising its third fund.
12/06/23
Bayer and Cargill partner to support market access for Indian farmers
Life sciences multinational Bayer and global agribusiness Cargill have partnered to offer digital solutions to Indian farmers. The two organisations plan to combine Cargill’s digital agriculture app Digital Saathi with Bayer’s footprint through the Better Life Farming (BLF) Centres, a global network of farming hubs backed by Bayer, International Finance Corporation (IFC) and irrigation equipment manufacturer Netafim. In India, BLF Centres offer advisory and support to 500,000 farmers. Cargill’s Digital Saathi uses AI to offer to Indian farmers a variety of solutions including hyper-localised crop advisory and agri e-commerce. The app has registered 50,000 farmers and targets three million farmers in eight states by 2027. The objective of the partnership is to improve market access for farmers, leveraging the market linkage capabilities of Digital Saathi to establish digital marketplaces (inputs and outputs) for farmers and aggregators. In recent months, Bayer has stricken several partnerships in India. In February, it signed a MOU with agri e-commerce WayCool to provide premium products to farmers, while last month it partnered with B2B market linkage platform Arya.ag to promote sustainable agriculture.
In other news…
06/0612
Scam accusations hit Nigerian agri/fintech Tingo
Nigerian agritech/fintech Tingo has been accused of false claims by Hindenburg Research, a US company specialised in forensic financial research. Tingo, which operates the Nwassa marketplace and is listed on the NASDAQ exchange, saw its shares decline buy as much as 80.27 percent to USD 0.07, according to reports. A report from Hindenburg Research states that the company is an “exceptionally obvious scam with completely fabricated financials”. Several accusations of false information have been raised against the CEO Dozy Mmobuosi. Recently, Tingo claimed that the platform had reached 9.6 million subscribers, and that it was targeting an additional 20 million via a partnership with agri cooperatives.
Among other findings, the report by Hindenburg Research states that these figures have been massively inflated and that the cooperatives deny the existence of such partnerships. Similarly, the report questions the actual launch of the Nwassa platform in Ghana, which the company announced last December. It is not the first time that agritechs in Nigeria have been accused of wrongdoings. In September 2022, a warrant was issued to FarmKonnect’s CEO Oluwole Azeez over an NGN 50 million (USD 117,000) investment fraud. Last October, the co-founder of fintech Cellulant, Bolaji Akinboro, reached a settlement regarding the appropriation of funds from the digital wallets of customers of Cellulant’s agritech subsidiary Agrikore.
09/06/23
Nigeria’s Crop2Cash receives Western Africa Startup Award
Nigerian agritech Crop2Cash emerged as a winner in the “Best Agri-Tech Startup” category at the Western Africa Startup Awards. The agritech is one of fourteen start-ups to receive an award consisting of funding, training and connections to investors. Founded in 2018, Crop2Cash digitises the agri value chain for agribusinesses, enabling the provision of agri digital financial services (Agri DFS) for smallholders. In February, Crop2Cash was the only agritech among the 11 finalists of MultiChoice Africa Accelerator Programme. Since its launch in 2018, the Western Africa Startup Awards have been part of the Global Startup Awards, the largest independent startup ecosystem competition, and a platform of the Global innovation Initiative Group (GIIG).