Wefarm, a London, UK-based farmer-to-farmer digital network, secured $5m in additional seed funding.
The round was led by True Ventures, with participation from Skype and Atomico Founder Niklas Zennström (angel investing in a personal capacity), WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg, Blue Bottle Coffee CEO Bryan Meehan, the Norrsken Foundation, LocalGlobe and Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV).
The company will use the funding to develop commercial product offerings and build a new set of features.
Led by Kenny Ewan, Founder and CEO, Wefarm is a crowdsourced peer-to-peer network enabling offline, small-scale farmers to connect with one another to solve problems, share ideas, and spread innovation.
Through Wefarm, farmers can ask questions in their own language on anything related to agriculture, from battling a crop disease or an infestation of army worm, to best practices for growing cash crops such as maize, tomatoes, coffee and tea.
The company, which uses machine learning and the crowd to source content and knowledge from a network of over 660,000 farmers, even via SMS, is currently operating in Kenya and Uganda with plans to expand into other areas of Eastern and Sub-Saharan Africa imminently.
One such feature is Project Farmlog – an interactive, “smart farming assistant” that works even on feature phones. It will use machine learning to intelligently support farmers both throughout the growing season and also with their livestock, based on the questions they have asked.
FinSMEs
13/03/2018