- Africa continues to grapple with food insecurity exacerbated by climate change and inadequate access to financing for both startups and food producers alike.
- In response, innovators and bold entrepreneurs are going digital, devising modern solutions to enhance food production.
- At the Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi, agri-innovation startups Homemade by Dropp, Koolboks, Samalife, BWS, Hello Tractor, Seabex and ReNile shared their entrepreneurial journey and reasons why they need financing to create value for farmers and consumers.
A number of startups with a focus on digital agricultural innovation in Africa are seeking fresh financing to scale and accelerate their growth across the continent, which is currently under pressure to feed a rising population.
These startups are eyeing opportunities in climate smart agriculture in Africa, the new frontier for business expansion globally.
Currently, agriculture remains the continent’s largest industry and employer. The industry is, however, facing significant challenges across the value chain, including limited access to inputs, production hurdles, massive post-harvest losses, and constrained market access for millions of small-scale farmers, delates during this year’s Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi heard.
Africa Tech Summit attracted thousands of delegates, including innovators who are rolling out digital agricultural innovation in key economies such as Dropp and Koolboks from Nigeria, Samalife in Senegal, BWS in Tunisia, Hello Tractor in Kenya, as well as Seabex and ReNile in Egypt.
With approximately 1.2 billion people market, Africa continues to grapple with food insecurity exacerbated by climate change and inadequate access to financing for both startups and food producers alike.
Digital agricultural innovation startups in Africa
In response, digital agricultural innovation is fast giving rise to modern solutions that help enhance crop and animal production. These solutions are equally improving access to quality farm produce and helping stir the market by powering food business thereby enhancing earnings across the value chain.
At the Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi, several digital agricultural innovation startups shared their entrepreneurial journey, highlighting their industry potential and the need for investors to join hands with them and accelerate their scaling while creating value for millions of farmers and end consumers.
Startups such as Dropp and Koolboks from Nigeria, Samalife from Senegal, BWS from Tunisia, Hello Tractor from Kenya, and ReNile are deploying unique agricultural technologies across African economies.
Homemade by Dropp – Avenue to make money from your home kitchen
Homemade by Dropp, a Nigeria-based digital agricultural innovation, is rolling out an operating system for food businesses across Africa.
The startup seeks to provide consumers with “homemade dishes,” which remain a hot preference for millions of consumers.
“We convert operational chaos into control by empowering restaurants and chefs with everything they need to become successful,” Homemade by Dropp’s Tunde Ogunkunle said during the Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi.
In the startup’s home in Nigeria, restaurants and chefs make an average of $120,000 and $6,000 annually, respectively.
Founded in 2022, Homemade by Dropp is deploying an online platform that empowers chefs, bakers, talented cooks, restaurateurs, and food entrepreneurs, providing them with the digital tools and necessary platform to start selling authentic local meals directly from their kitchens.
To scale and impact more players in the agricultural value chain, the Lagos-headquartered startup is seeking a pre-seed financing of $800,000.
“Your investment will empower 500 more independent chefs, 55 restaurants, and ultimately help us hit our target of $1.2 million in revenue in the next 18 months,” Tunde Ogunkunle told delates and potential investors in Nairobi.
Already, Homemade by Dropp is reporting $49,000 in revenue from 137 registered food businesses on its platform. The systems onboards food entrepreneurs on a portal that helps them to manage their menus and inventory, POS transactions, invoicing, marketing tools, linkages with farmers for supplies, as well as data and business analytics for their operations, among others.
How Koolboks is cutting food wastage through refrigeration
Still in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, Ayoola Dominic is overseeing a revolution in the urban and peri-urban food markets, offering solutions to thousands of traders who continue to grapple with electricity supply woes.
Ayoola is the co-founder and CEO of Koolboks, a startup that has developed an off-grid, solar-powered unit that works as a refrigerator or freezer to provide small businesses in Nigeria and beyond with cold-storage solutions.
Koolboks has developed an affordable off-grid solution capable of providing continuous refrigeration for up to four days, even without power and limited sunlight, a game changer in a country where access to stable electricity remains a big challenge. The startup achieves this feat by storing energy in the form of ice instead of just batteries, Ayoola explained.
“We created ice compartments in the refrigerator cabinets, so during the daytime, when the sun is available, which is often the case in Africa, ice is made in these compartments, and at night, when the sun is no longer available, energy switches internally to the ice, maintaining the temperature of the cabinet until the next day when the sun is available again,” Ayoola said during the Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi.
The refrigeration unit comes equipped with two LED lighting bulbs and USB ports for charging mobile phones for traders to enhance their communications. It can serve as a refrigerator, freezer, and a source of lighting for households and shops.
Ayoola told investors in Nairobi that Koolboks has already sold 600 units, saving the world roughly 38,000 metric tonnes (MT) of greenhouse gas emissions, and targets to save 110,000 MT of gas emissions by 2026.
The company, which plans to empower 135,000 women by 2027, is seeking $21 million in capital injection to help solve the persistent problems of food wastage in Africa’s agriculture while making produce affordable to more people in areas not serviced by the grid.
Samalife from Senegal
Another startup scaling Africa’s digital agricultural innovation is Samalife, which seeks to solve the daily challenge of offering fast, price-competitive, and diversified meal options for over 4 million residents in Dakar, Senegal.
The startup is eyeing a slice of Senegal’s food delivery market, estimated at roughly $33.9 million annually and growing at a rate of 18.58 percent, co-founder Tomoss Diene told investors in Nairobi.
According to Tomoss, Samalife offers a variety of ready-to-eat meals accessible via both digital and traditional channels with fast delivery and data-driven service as the startup’s industry advantage.
Samalife, which is seeking $150,000 in capital financing to scale, leverages cutting-edge technology and efficient operations to deliver top-quality, and great-value meal choices to residents across cities in Senegal.
Currently, Samalife is operating five virtual restaurant brands, accounting for 100 square meters of kitchen space in the vibrant Dakar city, and has delivered 15,000 food orders since April 2022.
In its growth plan, Samalife seeks to unveil a virtual B2B meal ordering platform to offer meals to businesses and schools while also leveraging cutting-edge tools to power real-time management of its production processes and cut costs.
Hello Tractor – ‘Uber’ for Farm Machines
Also in the race to secure financing is Kenya-based Hello Tractor, a digital agricultural innovation whose business model provides farmers with access to 4,286 tractors and has seen over 3 million acres under cultivation.
Hello Tractor’s Susan Njihia told investors in Nairobi at the Africa Tech Summit that the company also offers value-chain agricultural advisory services besides aiding farmers in accessing seeds, fertilizers, insurance, and handy tips on the best crop practices for optimum yields.
Seeking $30 million in debt financing, Hello Tractor offers convenient and affordable tractor services to farmers and also creates additional income opportunities by converting tractors into Smart Tractors. The company’s platform offers tractor owners the chance to remotely track their assets, preventing fraud and misuse.
Tunisia-based Be Wireless Solutions (BWS)
In Tunisia, a northern African country where farmers are struggling with access to water on their farms, Be Wireless Solutions (BWS) founder Karim Kharrat is leading a team of experts in rolling out water solutions.
“We are looking for partners who are committed to sustainable development” in supporting the startup’s route to the market strategy by 2025.
Founded in 2018, BWS has established itself as a reliable partner for many private and public institutions across Europe, particularly in France and Switzerland. The company has also made significant inroads in Africa, operating in Tunisia, Morocco, and Senegal. Additionally, BWS has a presence in the Middle East, specifically in Qatar.
The company’s platform provides a wide range of solutions, such as intelligent public lighting, monitoring of energy consumption, smart irrigation systems for the agriculture industry, route optimization, and management of fuel consumption in vehicle fleets.
Karim Kharrat noted that BWS aims to launch its commercial operations in Europe by the end of 2023, marking a significant milestone in its journey.
Egypt’s ReNile
ReNile, an Egypt-based agritech company, specializes in providing comprehensive solutions for smart farming by leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) and advanced management of water, air, and soil quality to maximize production for farmers in water-scarce areas.
Through ReNile’s innovative monitoring systems, the startup offers real-time online analytics that empower farmers to enhance production efficiency and optimize resource consumption.
By monitoring farms, alerting users in emergencies, controlling operations, and providing analytics based on best practices, ReNile’s online platform serves as a one-stop solution for modern farming needs in the face of climate change.
With a focus on sustainability and precision agriculture, ReNile’s integrated approach to smart farming helps farmers make informed decisions and achieve higher yields while minimizing environmental impact.
By offering end-to-end solutions, ReNile is revolutionizing the agricultural sector in Egypt and across Africa, enabling farmers to adopt cutting-edge technologies and practices for a more sustainable and efficient future.
ReNile’s suite of IoT-enabled solutions helps farmers better understand their water, air, and soil abilities in aspects such as PH, salinity, CO2 levels, and moisture content, among others, to achieve optimum standards for food production.
ReNile CEO Hazem Eltawab said the startup is seeking roughly $400,000 in fresh capital boost from investors to enhance its distribution network across MENA and Africa. At the moment, ReNile generates about 56 percent of its gross profit from the sale of hardware.
ReNile’s other chief sources of revenue are maintenance fees and subscriptions from customers in Africa and across the Middle East market.
“ReNile will be the first Product as a Service (PaaS) in the region to provide environmental monitoring and control systems for farmers,” Eltawab told investors during the Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi.
Revolutionizing agriculture in Africa
Overall, these startups represent a burgeoning ecosystem of digital solutions aimed at revolutionizing agriculture in Africa. However, for these startups to realize their full potential, they require support from investors, governments, and other stakeholders.
Access to finance, mentorship, and conducive regulatory environments are equally crucial for their growth. By scaling digital agricultural innovation, these startups have the potential to transform Africa’s agricultural landscape, improve food security, and create opportunities for millions of small-scale farmers across the continent.
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