Farmcrowdy, a crowdfunding platform for Nigerian farmers has today announced an additional seed funding of $1 million from international investors Cox Enterprises and Techstars, along with local investor Ajayi Solutions.
Today’s announcement follows Farmcrowdy’s initial investments of $1 million in 2017 asit gears towards its upcoming Series A fundraise later this year.
According to Onyeka Akumah, Founder and CEO of Farmcrowdy: “Today’s announcement of this additional funding, marks another milestone for us as we amplify our presence in the country and explore new opportunities. 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.”
Farmcrowdy will use the investment to continue building their award-winning model, whilst expanding across Nigeria to cover 50% of all 36 states in the country over the next 12 months.
The company also launched the Farmcrowdy Group, which will support the startup’s mandate of building agritech solutions that enable the achievement of food security on the continent of Africa.
Founded in Nigeria in 2016, Farmcrowdy has empowered over 12,000 farmers across 14 states in the Nigeria, reared close to 2,000,000 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.
With farm sponsors in Nigeria and across the diaspora, Farmcrowdy is effectively growing a community model that is set to continue the empowerment of local farmers and facilitate food production in Nigeria and eventually across Africa.
Today the firm also launched the Farmcrowdy TFS App, available to its Technical Field Specialists to better profile farmers, manage inventory, as well as collect and analyse data collection from existing farmers.
“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.” said Cody Simms, a Partner at Techstars who did a follow-on investment in this round of funding after their previous investment.
