Ghanaian agriculure startup Farmerline has raised a $12.9 Million Pre-Series A funding ($6.4m equity and $6.5m debt).
The equity round was led by Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund (ARAF) and FMO, the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank, with participation from Greater Impact Foundation. Debt lenders included DEG, Rabobank, Ceniarth, Rippleworks, Mulago Foundation, Whole Planet Foundation, the Netri Foundation and Kiva.
Farmerline plans to reach 300,000 farmers in 2022 and will start its expansion in Ghana before expanding to the neighboring Ivory Coast.
Farmerline works with agribusinesses (usually small retail shops that stock farm inputs) to ensure that farmers get access to high-quality supplies. These shop owners, usually the first point of knowledge for the farmers, are used by Farmerline to distribute educational material and to gather farmers together for training. The partnering shops use the startup’s Mergdata, a proprietary AI technology platform for supply chain intelligence, to digitize the farmers they serve, and to generate the data the agritech needs to predict the demand of farm supplies.
“We are tapping into that network of agribusiness, and in a way, we are tapping into a network of trust — the relationship that these shop owners have with farmers to help us expand,” said Alloysius Attah, CEO of Farmerline.
Story credit: Techcrunch
