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Founded by Peris Bosire and Rita Kimani, FarmDrive delivers productive digital loans and lay away savings products to smallholder farmers in Kenya, helping them grow their incomes and resilience.

Agri-tech startup in Kenya, FarmDrive has gotten access to more finance as its operations recently faced expansion to make provision for 3 million shareholders farmers.

This funding was secured from UK charity Shell Foundation, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), AV Ventures and Rabo Foundation. “This is a significant milestone for AgroCenta, having the support of leading institutions, particularly with the COVID-19 backdrop, underlining the strength of AgroCenta and the importance of its mission. The demand for agricultural raw materials from offtakers in the brewery, manufacturing and consumer sector is increasing exponentially because of the easing of the COVID-19 restrictions that were put in place by the government of Ghana, hence this capital injection will help to secure purchases at fair and transparent prices from smallholders — a much needed lifeline for many who are at the proverbial bottom of the pyramid”. Francis Obirikorang, AgroCenta’s CEO and Co-Founder Michael Ocansey said while highlighting the importance and criticality of this investment.

Founded in 2015, AgroCenta is an online sales solution for smallholder farmers, with two offerings – supply chain platform AgroTrade, and financial inclusion service AgroPay.

Disrupt Africa reported yesterday AgroCenta was one of six African startups awarded non-equity funding by the GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator. Though the startup’s co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Francis Obirikorang declined to disclose the breakdown of equity versus grant cash, Disrupt Africa can confirm that the GSMA input is worth around US$250,000. Obirikorang said the funds will be used to scale up AgroCenta’s operations in Ghana, while the GSMA grant is more specifically geared towards the AgroPay platform, which provides any smallholder farmer who has traded using AgroTrade with a financial statement they can use to get access to finance.

“The demand for agricultural raw materials from offtakers in the brewery, manufacturing and consumer sector is increasing exponentially because of the easing of the COVID-19 restrictions that were put in place by the government of Ghana, hence this capital injection will help to secure purchases at fair and transparent prices from smallholders — a much needed lifeline for many who are at the proverbial bottom of the pyramid.”

This is a significant milestone for AgroCenta, having the support of leading institutions, particularly with the COVID-19 backdrop, underlining the strength of AgroCenta and the importance of its mission,” they said. 

The investment will allow FarmDrive to scale to US$13 million of loan originations in 2019 with minimal losses and exceptional returns using RiPe, a customisable lending engine that will allow lenders to plug in and access low-cost loan origination channels such as USSD, credit scoring, identity verification, and a portfolio management suite that includes recovery and collections, payments, customer support, and advanced real-time data analytics.

The company was recognized for successfully managing over 4.3 million smallholder farmers through their Area Risk Index and yield insurance product. It provides insurance services and digital solutions to farmers in Africa. The company uses the crop cut experiment as a claim assessment procedure. This assessment relies heavily on ground crop cuts and it’s fed on mobile apps which relay instant feedback to clients.