WorldCover, is a for-profit company that aspires to provide the 90% of smallholder famers around the world with access to crop insurance.  In countries like Ghana, there is no social safety net.  Every farmer is one natural disaster away from ruin.

WorldCover has raised a sum of $6 million Series A fund to help support smallholder farmers in emerging countries in Africa. The company reduces the risk of farming for smallholder farmers with the use of satellite imagery, on-ground sensors, mobile phones and data analytics to provide crop insurance protection.

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WorldCover was founded to address the last-mile transfer of these kinds of risk by powering a climate risk marketplace initially targeted at the ag sector. In emerging markets (starting with SSA), WorldCover connects farmers (and ag parties exposed to climatic risks) with climate risk investors. Through its risk transfer platform, the company offers farmers protection against natural disasters and phenomena that negatively affect their crop yields, while giving risk investors the desired diversification of their risk portfolios and offering uncorrelated investment returns. For the farmers, insurance cover provided through WorldCover safeguards their livelihoods and, as studies have shown, gives farmers the confidence to further invest in their farms, unlocks access to credit and other services, and ultimately produces more income for them and their community.

WorldCover pairs long term remote weather data with the latest satellite technology, making complex actuarial calculations into simple policy term sheets.Our technology combines machine learning with agronomy, compares multiple data sources and forecasts to give you the most targeted and accurate insurance possible.

WorldCover CEO and co-founder Christopher Sheehan told Business Ghana: “WorldCover has uniquely combined technological advances and developed a solution that allows us to support smallholder farmers caught in conditions that are worsening due to climate change.

Based on its success thus far in Ghana, WorldCover expects that its model could expand to work across the entire developing world, where 500 million smallholder farming households feed 80% of the population. Ultimately, this approach could scale far beyond drought insurance, to provide protection against other risks.

WorldCover has uniquely combined technological advances and developed a solution that allows us to support smallholder farmers caught in conditions that are worsening due to climate change," said Christopher Sheehan, WorldCover CEO and co-founder. “With the rise of many insuretech startups around the world, we are excited about this successful round of Series A funding as it enables us to accelerate growth in existing markets while working towards expansion into new regions. This will allow us to fulfill our ultimate vision of making the world more resilient to climate change”.

WorldCover is a socially conscious alternative to traditional investment avenues. Started in 2015 by Chris Sheehan and Shiliang Tang, they have focused on using finance as a “tool for good in the world,” to prove “that businesses with inherently positive social impact can also grow rapidly and create wealth for investors.”

World Cover is an insurtech startup which provides satellite-enabled climate insurance to smallholder farmers. The company was originally founded in 2015 as a fintech marketplace for climate insurance, and has consistently grown since then, providing support to many areas of Africa. Unlike traditional insurance companies, which require lengthy in-person evaluations, the company consolidates data on weather and crop yield obtained from satellites

WorldCover approached the communications challenge from two directions. First, better understand the customer base. Second, communicate to the customer base with greater frequency. Both approaches increased trust in the product and WorldCover brand, leading to higher retention rates.

WorldCover is applying insurtech solutions to climate change—a challenging global problem. Using satellite data, on-ground sensing and innovative risk modeling, the company developed a climate and weather-linked insurance product. Today, WorldCover supports and protects farmers within developing countries, who are faced with some of the worst droughts in the world due to climate change.

WorldCover sells crop insurance to farmers in the developing world, starting with Ghana. We use remote sensing and data science to create a simple and affordable insurance product to protect farmers from drought. Our insurance policies are funded by investors through a marketplace model so we don’t directly take risk for payouts.

For the moment, WorldCover only insures for events such as rainfall risk, but in the future it will look to include other weather events, such as tropical storms, in its insurance programs and platform data analytics.

Lumkani has always had the dream of making communities more resilient to the devastation of shack fires. Having the opportunity to cover an additional 20 000 South African homes with our early warning system has been a big step towards realising this,” says Francois Petousis, Director of Humanitarian Projects at Lumkani. “Every week we hear stories of people who have heard our fire alarms ringing in a neighbourhood, or have received our SMS saying that their house is on fire which has helped them to race home to put out a small fire before it caused any damage. That is huge motivation for us to reach even more homes across our country.”

South African startup Lumkani, which addresses the challenge of fire safety in informal settlements through a combination of early-warning fire detection technology and financial services, has closed a seed funding round to provide insurance coverage to low-income consumers.

Lumkani is a social enterprise that seeks to address the challenge of shack/slum fires in urban informal settlements in South Africa and across the globe. Lumkani aims to create social impact in two ways. Firstly by increasing the safety and security of people living in informal settlements with technology-based early-warning systems, and secondly with affordable relevant financial services products, such as our Lumkani short term fire insurance for informal homes.

South African startup Lumkani has installed its early warning fire detection system in an additional 20,000 homes across the country, meaning it has now equipped 40,000 high fire risk homes in several of the country’s informal settlements.

Lumkani devices are networked to each other using radio frequency, the same technology used in garage remotes. When a fire is detected, the alarm sounds in all homes within a 40 meter radius, using a different tone to signify to users when the blaze is in a separate dwelling.

Lumkani has created the world’s first networked heat-detector designed specifically for informal settlements. Lumkani’s heat detector addresses the devastation caused by the spread of fires in urban slums, by creating a community wide early warning.