The distance between their farms and the nearest processor is key for smallholder farmers who need to process their crops. And though Nigeria’s food processing systems have a keen resemblance to the West with respect to big factories and huge economies of scale in high-demand cities, farmers still suffer from poor logistics networks.

With distance and logistics problems, farmers’ crops can go bad and when factories buy them, it affects their processing yields and price. Farmers, witnessing post-harvest loss, also get paid less and miss the opportunity to invest in their crops production.

Nigerian agritech startup Releaf is solving this by building proprietary hardware and software solutions to make these farmers and food factories more efficient and profitable. Today, the company is announcing that it has raised $2.7 million in seed towards this effort.

Pan-African focused venture capital firms Samurai Incubate Africa, Future Africa and Consonance Investment Managers led the round. Individual investors like Stephen Pagliuca, the chairman of Bain Capital and Justin Kan of Twitch also participated.

In addition to the seed round, the agritech startup secured $1.5 million in grants from The Challenge Fund for Youth Employment (CFYE) and USAID.

Founded by Ikenna Nzewi and Uzoma Ayogu, Releaf focuses on value chains where smaller factories are set up near smallholder farmers. This allows them to get better processing yields and fewer logistics costs; in the end, the farmer has more money to work with.

When the pair started the company in 2017, the idea behind Releaf was not concrete yet as the team, based in the U.S., had not figured out product-market fit.

First, it planned to increase productivity in Nigeria’s agricultural sector using software. Even after graduating from Y Combinator’s summer batch that year, Releaf toyed around with ideas around trade finance and a marketplace for buyers and sellers of agricultural products.

The team would get a clearer picture of what it wanted to build when the founders moved back to Nigeria. The Americans of Nigerian descent toured across 20 states and studied different value chains for crops spotting inefficiencies that could be solved by technology.

“We took a much more broad approach to what the solution would be, but we really wanted to decide on a specific crop to work in. And we found that opportunity in the oil palm sector,” Nzewi said to TechCrunch in an interview.

The oil palm market in Nigeria is a $3 billion one with over 4 million smallholder farmers cultivating farms where those crops are planted.

These farmers drive 80% of the production of oil palm. But since the industry is quite fragmented, they have many challenges processing the oil palm because it’s a crop that requires serious processing power to extract vegetable oil from it.


https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/15/nigerian-agritech-startup-releaf-secures-4-2m-to-scale-its-food-processing-technology/

Awesome!! Really impressive

Do you know where the company located?

Migo01:
Awesome!! Really impressive

Do you know where the company located?

Not really! Most likely gonna be in Lagos