Ingressive Capital, a venture capital fund that targets pre-seed and seed stage tech businesses in both the B2B and B2C spaces and just last June announced being a $10 Million VC Fund I and currently working towards being a $50 Million Fund II targeting early-stage startups across Sub-Saharan Africa’s key tech markets has added a new portfolio account to their list.
Their Fund I has seeded some of Africa’s fastest-growing businesses, including Paystack (sold for $200M+ to Stripe); 54gene (Series A led by Adjuvant, an IFC fund); Tizeti (Series A led by 4DX).
33% of portfolio companies are female-founded and 31% of companies are Y Combinator alumni, so it is no surprise Complete Farmer is the newest addition as Ingressive Capital has committed to making a high impact in the ecosystem and what better way than an Agro Tech company?
Complete Farmer, like most disruptive innovations, started by exploring better ways to improve age-old processes.
The Agtech company was founded in 2017 and its core offerings were to bring farming to the fingertips of thousands of users around the world allowing them to own tech-enabled farms in Africa and digitally experience the farming process.
A quick deep dive into Complete Farmer, the platform has always been envisioned to be an end-to-end platform for the three key stakeholders on the agriculture value chain, food growers, food buyers, and food lovers.
The aim is to get these stakeholders interacting with each other in a manner that increases transparency and efficiency for all these stakeholders.
Over the past three years, they have successfully implemented a crowd farmer model with a total of 7,200 acres of total production serving commodities to Asia, Europe and the rest of the world, however, they are not to be misconstrued as a crowdfunding platform rather Africa’s first end-to-end digital agriculture value chain platform.
According to Uwem Uwemakpan VP of Fund Operations at Ingressive Capital:
“This investment also comes at the right time as many African farmers have struggled to bounce back from the ripple effects of the Coronavirus pandemic amongst a host of other policy and infrastructural problems Complete Farmer is solving”
Speaking to Desmond Koney, CEO of Complete Farmer, “After the failure of my dad’s pineapple farm, after his demise, I witnessed first hand the challenges across the agriculture value chain.
Complete Farmer started in the effort to answer the key questions of how to solve the broken nature of Africa’s agriculture value chain, and to redeem a fathers legacy.
We set out to find ways to build farms like factories to feed global supply chains using production engineering methodologies while relying and building on a data infrastructure.
Basically we want to build for farming in Africa what Amazon has built for retail.”
He continues, “We are very excited about the next chapter and our partnership with Ingressive Capital. Together, we believe we are going to transform agriculture using technology and innovations to realize Africa’s potential to feed the world.
With the network within the Ingressive capital family and the synergies with the existing portfolio companies, this partnership gives us the needed resources to become global pioneers in making Africa’s agriculture more efficient and competitive.”
Complete farmer’s platform currently supports over 2000 acres of farmland across six regions in Ghana and is projected to expand its operations to Kenya and Togo.
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