Farmcrowdy raises additional seed funding of $1 million, announces Farmcrowdy Group

Farmcrowdy, a leading digital agriculture platform which allows Nigerians to invest in agriculture today announced that it has closed an additional seed funding of $1 million.

This brings the total amount raised by the company in seed funding to $2 million. However, in February 2018, they received a grant of $325,000 from GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator.

This round comes as a follow-on from international investors Cox Enterprises and Techstars, along with local investor Ajayi Solutions.

Registered in August 2016, Farmcrowdy Limited was co-founded by five people; Onyeka Akumah, Ifeanyi Anazodo, Akindele Phillips, Jimoh Maiyegun, Tope Omotolani, with Mr Akumah as the CEO.

They have grown to a team size of 50 people, empowering over 12,000 farmers across 14 states in the Nigeria. With this additional seed raise, they hope to cover four more states. Also, they have reared close to 2 million broiler birds as part of its poultry farm cycles and cultivated over 16,000 acres of farmland with over 35,000 farm units sold to date. Their farm sponsors are located both in Nigeria and across the diaspora.

As a sequel to their seed funding, the startup is preparing for a Series A round later this year to enable them scale faster. Farmcrowdy will use the investment to continue fueling her farm funding model while expanding across the whole of Nigeria.

The startup's goal is to empower local farmers and facilitate food production in Nigeria and eventually across Africa, according to a statement.

Leveraging technology to power agricultural and business operations

The CEO of Farmcrowdy, Onyeka Akumah says they will now look to other areas in which technology can help with their farm operations.  

We are delving into the possibility of utilising drone services for field analysis, improving our farmers yield with additional research and 3D mapping, as well as entering into formidable strategic partnerships that will grow the impact of our work

Already, the startup has launched an app for her Technical Field Specialists (TFS) to aid in profiling farmers, managing inventory, as well as collecting and analysing data from existing farmers.

Their use of technology doesn't stop at improving farming operations but also the user experience of their crowd-sourced investors. The startup is in the process of upgrading their Farmcrowdy app which currently has 50,000+ installs on the android app store.

According to a Partner at Techstars, Cody Simms who did a follow-on investment in Farmcrowdy, Techstars has been impressed by the continued growth of the startup.

Techstars has been deeply impressed by Farmcrowdy's mission to end poverty in Africa one farmer at a time since we first invested in the company in 2017 as part of Techstars Atlanta in partnership with Cox Enterprises. We are excited about the continued growth of the Farmcrowdy platform and thrilled to continue our support of the business with the most recent financing.

Alongside this fund raise, the company is also announcing the launch of Farmcrowdy Group, which will support their mandate of building agritech solutions that enable the achievement of food security in Africa.

Updated, 11:27am—The press release has been updated to reflect commentary and edits from the Benjamin Dada team.