Apollo Agriculture raises $40m to scale across East and West Africa

Kenyan based agri-tech, Apollo Agriculture, announced that it has raised $40 million in a funding round led by SoftBank Investment. Other participants include Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Yara Growth Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst, CDC, and existing investors including Anthemis Exponential Ventures, Flourish Ventures, Leaps by Bayer, SBI, Breyer Capital, and TO Ventures Food.

Apollo Agriculture helps small-scale farmers maximize their profits by providing a one-stop shop providing everything a farmer needs: financing, farm inputs, advice, insurance, and market access. They achieve this by using satellite data and machine learning to enable better credit decisions, and automated operations to keep costs low and processes scalable.

Apollo Agriculture’s most recent funding came from a credit facility of $1 million from Agri-Business Capital Fund (ABC Fund) in 2021 and a series A funding round of $6 million led by Anthemis in 2020.

Founded in 2016 by CEO Eli Pollak, Benjamin Njenga and Earl St Sauver, Apollo Agriculture intends to use the new funding to refine its technology and deliver more products and services to farmers.

As at the end of 2021, Apollo claims to have worked with 100,000 farmers. It currently has a network of over a thousnad retailers and 5,000 agents spread across Kenya.

The agents onboard farmers to the Apollo while retailers use the startup’s “checkout app” to handle point of sale, inventory, source wholesale orders and as access to trade credit.

Apollo Agriculture intends to double the number of farmers it works with, by expanding across Kenya but entering into new markets. It is looking for growth opportunities in East and West Africa

SoftBank Investment investment director, AdvisersAlexia Yannopoulos, said, “in the face of sustained macroeconomic and geopolitical volatility, feeding the world is one of the most important challenges facing society. Apollo’s platform offers a one stop shop solution to help small-scale farmers in emerging regions to improve crop and livestock outputs. Embedding valuable financial services like credit, insurance and advice into the supply chain is critical in supporting a more efficient and sustainable global food chain.”