iProcure secures $10.2million to expand across East Africa

iProcure, a Kenyan B2B agtech startup, announced that it has raised $10.2 million in a Series B funding round. The amount raised includes $1.2 million in debt led by Investisseurs & Partenaires (I&P) and with participation from Novastar Ventures, Ceniarth, and British International Investment (BII).

Along with other investments including the undisclosed amount from Spark Ventures in 2017, this brings total funding raised so far to $17.2 million.

iProcure intends to use this new inflow to expand in Kenya and Uganda and enter into Tanzania.

Founded in 2014 by Stefano Carcoforo (CEO), with Nicole Galletta (head of innovation), Patrick Wanjohi (chief technical officer) and Bernard Maingi (chief commercial officer), iProcure claims to be the largest agricultural supply chain platform in rural Africa. Apart from providing complete procurement and last mile distribution services, it provides business intelligence and data-driven stock management across the supply chains.

iProcure currently connects 5,000 agro-dealers to different manufacturers but it plans to increase this number across the three markets, and increase its distribution hubs to 20, boosting its last-mile delivery.

iProcure has an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform that its agro-dealers connect via mobile devices to manage their sourcing and distribution.

In an interview with Techcrunch, Carcoforo said “The agro-dealers use our technology to keep track of their sales, process sales, to manage inventory, to place orders, and build CRMs that can help deploy loyalty programs to the farmers. It does everything they need. We provide a completely transparent system from the factory all the way down to the point when the farmer purchases the product.”

Stefano Carcoforo was recently replaced as CEO by ex-Novastar partner, Niraj Varia. With Varia’s appointment, Carcoforo becomes the chief data and growth officer.

Niraj Varia says that it plans to do the following to successfully scale up in its region (double its reach to 2 million farmers) within the next couple of months:

• introduce a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) service;
• provide zero-interest credit to agro-dealers, increasing their ability to purchase the hardware required to use its ERP system;
• extend its BNPL offering to enable agrovets to serve farmers without being constrained by their own cash flows;
• invest in data so as to generate insights to improve its own performance and transform farmers’ decision-making process