Digital Agriculture in LMICs -18 Apr #54
Pula raises $20M Series B to bring insurance to 100M farmers; CropIn launches agri-focused Generative AI in South Asia; Orange, EU, GIZ partner for digitalisation of cocoa sector in Cote d’Ivoire
11/04/24
Ugandan digital marketplace Inputi backed by funders
According to reports, Uganda’s agritech Inputi, a market linkages platform for inputs, has raised an undisclosed amount of new funding from the United States International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) under the USADF-DFC African Small Business Catalyst Program (ASBC Program). Founded in 2020, Inputi is a digital marketplace, aggregator and distributor of authentic crop and livestock inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides. It delivers inputs to a network of 1,000+ agro shops, dairy cooperatives, and meat cooperatives across Uganda. The company guarantees input delivery at regional hubs or directly to the end customer at a fixed transportation cost. In addition, the agritech supports farmers with agri advisory services, post-harvest handling and financial services. In October 2022, Inputi received an undisclosed amount of funding from impact investment firm Renew Capital via its network of investors dubbed Renew Capital Angels.
15/04/24
Pula bags $20M Series B to bring insurance to smallholders globally
Kenya-based insurtech Pula, a provider of insurance for smallholder farmers, has raised USD 20 million Series B. Global investment manager BlueOrchard led the round via its InsuResilience Global Partnership Fund. Funding also came from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) via its USD 225 million venture capital platform, which provides equity and equity-like investments. In addition, The Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP) fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Hesabu Capital, as well as existing investors participated in the round. Pula plans to leverage the capital injection to form new partnerships, including for livestock insurance, and to eventually insure 100 million farmers. Established in 2015, the insurtech has built a network of 100+ B2B partners, including charitable organisations, banks, governments, and agricultural input companies, enabling them to embed insurance in farm input costs or credit provision. Insurance is underwritten by insurance and reinsurance companies, with Pula designing the products by leveraging its digital actuary platform, which uses historical data, including weather data (e.g. frequency of events like floods or drought), harvests, losses and inputs used. Pula states has reached to date 15.4 million farmers across 22 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
16/04/24
CropIn launches gen AI model for smallholder agriculture in South Asia
Indian agritech CropIn, an AI and data driven software as service (SaaS) agritech, has launched an open source generative AI micro language model (MLM) to support farmers in adopting climate smart agriculture practices. Named akṣara (Akshara), the model is an AI-powered digital agronomist designed for nine major crops in South Asia (paddy, wheat, maize, sorghum, barley, cotton, sugarcane, soybean, and millets). It uses Mistral as a foundation Large Language Model (LLM) and is fine-tuned with data from Cropin’s internal knowledge base, specific to the nine major crops and their conditions in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. It has been trained on 5,000 domain-specific datasets from South Asia. As an MLM, Akshara is intended for narrower tasks, offering a more practical and frugal solution for specific applications. As an open source tool, it is available to government, agribusinesses, researchers and academia to train it on diverse datasets and develop tailored agricultural AI advisory. Established in 2010, CropIn has to date raised USD 46.4 million, according to Crunchbase, the latest funding being a USD 13.7 million Series D round in early January 2022.
Photo Credit: CropIn
17/04/24
Orange, the EU and GIZ join forces for digital innovation in Cote d'Ivoire’s cocoa sector
Mobile operator Orange, the European Union (EU) and the German Agency for International Development Cooperation (GIZ) have joined forces to advance digital agriculture services in Cote d’Ivoire. Under a new programme dubbed “DigiGreen & Agri” the three organisations will support innovative agritech startups through a fund of EUR 7.6 million (USD 8.1 million). The programme will focus on the cocoa value chain. Cote d’Ivoire is the world’s largest exporter of cocoa and produces up to 40% of the global output for this commodity. About 7 million people are involved in cocoa farming.
Photo credit: WeAreTech.Africa
DigiGreen & Agri will support youth-led startups, and will prioritise those addressing eco-responsible practices, primarily deforestation, and contributing to the objectives of the new EUDR regulation that addresses deforestation and forest degradation. According to global advocacy organisation Mighty Earth, tree cover loss in the cocoa growing regions of Cote d'Ivoire has increased from 5,500 hectares in 2019 to 8,400 hectares in 2022. The DigiGreen & Agri initiative also looks to support startups willing to work with underserved groups in rural areas, including women, and people with disabilities.
17/04/24
Digital Agri Hub announces collaboration with AGRA for data, insights and events
The Digital Agri Hub has announced a partnership with AGRA. Hosted and maintained as an independent entity by Wageningen University and Research (WUR), the Hub is a multi-actor data and knowledge broker. It offers data, analytics and insights supporting agricultural transformation in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Under the partnership, the Hub and AGRA will collaborate on harvesting data and insights across the digital agriculture landscape globally, streamlining and promoting curated and verified digital agriculture solutions deployed in LMICs, and co-facilitating knowledge sharing events for sector practitioners. Last October, the Digital Agri Hub reached the milestone of 1,100+ curated digital agriculture solutions on its dashboard, covering all 134 LMICs. The Hub builds on the research by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) in partnership with Dalberg Advisors, which resulted in The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019 and its database.