GHANA – Complete Farmer, an end-to-end digital farming platform, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Ingressive Capital as it plans to expand into other markets.
Desmond Koney, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Complete Farmer, said he was excited about the next chapter and the start-up’s partnership with Ingressive Capital.
“Together, we believe we are going to transform agriculture using technology and innovations to realise Africa’s potential to feed the world.
“With the network within the Ingressive capital family and the synergies with the existing portfolio companies, this partnership gives us the needed resources to become global pioneers in making Africa’s agriculture more efficient and competitive,” he said.
Ingressive Capital is a venture capital fund that targets pre-seed and seed stage tech businesses in both the B2B and B2C spaces.
Last year it announced a new US$10 million fund, and it has been gradually adding new portfolio companies to add to the likes of Paystack, 54gene and Tizeti.
“We believe we are going to transform agriculture using technology and innovations to realise Africa’s potential to feed the world.”
Desmond Koney – CEO, Complete Farmer
Uwem Uwemakpan, VP of fund operations at Ingressive Capital, explained the rationale behind the firm’s investment.
“This investment comes at the right time as many African farmers have struggled to bounce back from the ripple effects of the coronavirus pandemic amongst a host of other policy and infrastructural problems Complete Farmer is solving,” he said.
The platform has also announced the launch of a new digital platform that addresses key challenges faced by commodity buyers and food growers along Africa’s agriculture value chain.
With the launch of its new offering, Complete Farmer is set to make an even deeper impact on the agriculture value chain.
The new platform is an end-to-end digital marketplace that enables global industries to source agriculture commodities, grown to their specifications, by users from all over the world using IoT, big data and blockchain technology.
Scheduled for an April 2021 release this year the platform has been built as a three-sided marketplace where commodity Buyers, Food Growers and Digifarmers cantransparently participate in digital agriculture and interact on a single platform.
Commodity buyers from across the globe can build entire supply chains into Africa without having to work through middlemen and get full visibility into the process from cultivation to post-harvest, quality control, transportation and logistics using blockchain traceability features leaving them in no doubt on progress, yield and quality.
“With the rise of B2B e-commerce, expectations of B2B buyers are changing. The rise of the Amazons, Ubers, Googles and the other big tech giants of this world are changing mindsets of commodity buyers who now expect an easy comparison of suppliers, seamless online ordering processes and convenient deliveries,” said Desmond.
“In an always-connected world where data is the new oil, commodity buyers also expect and deserve much more transparency in the production process.”
Founded in 2017, Complete Farmer has over the past years implemented a crowd-farming model with a total of 7,200 acres of production serving commodities to Asia, Europe and the rest of the world.
Complete Farmer’s platform currently supports over 2,000 acres of farmland across six regions in Ghana, and the startup plans to expand its operations to Kenya and Togo.
This goal has become a lot closer after it became the 21st portfolio company of Ingressive Capital, with a wider round in the works.
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