ThriveAgric emerges global winner of Visa Everywhere Initiative 2022

Over the weekend, ThriveAgric emerged the global winner of #VisaEverywhereInitiative 2022. The Nigerian Agritech startup also won emerged the Visa Direct winner at the event which took place at the Black Box Theatre, in Education City, Qatar.

In total, ThriveAgric took home $120,000 in prize money – $100,000 as the overall winner and $20,000 as the Visa Direct winner. In June this, the startup emerged the winner to represent the CEMEA (Central Europe, Middle East, Africa) region.

The Visa Everywhere Initiative is an open innovation programme that helps startups unlock new growth and partnership opportunities. It also provides startups with a global platform to demonstrate their ground-breaking solutions. The program first launched in the U.S. in 2015 and quickly expanded into a global program. To date, 8,500 startups have participated, and have collectively raised more than $16 billion in funding.

This year, Visa was interested in how startups and fintechs integrated Visa Direct, Visa’s global money movement network, into their solutions. 4,000+ fintechs entered the competition, including 1,130 from CEMEA region this year.

The finalists were:

• Christine De Wendel of Sunday (North America) – The fastest digital payment for restaurants and the industry’s future
• Alejandro Vega of Huli (Latin America) – Platform that connects patients, doctors and other healthcare services
• Ayo Arikawe of ThriveAgric (Central Europe, Middle East and Africa) – Providing small holder farmers access to finance, insight and distribution.
• Mriganka Pattnaik of Mriganka Pattnaik of Merkle Science (AP) – Merkle Science is the next generation predictive Web3 risk & intelligence platform
• Dan Saunders of Zeti (Europe) – Fintech enabling pay per use financing of sustainable transport

The second and third place winners were:

• Zeti (2nd place) – a startup founded by Dan Saunders, helps organisations adopt zero emission vehicles by making it simple, easy and transparent as paying for a utility. Zeti helps its manufacturers to sell their vehicles and generate attractive returns for financiers;
• Huli (3rd place) – a Latin America digital healthcare startup founded by Alejandro Vega.

ThriveAgric is an agriculture technology company that enables strategic partnerships with financial institutions and agriculture value chain players to provide smallholders with financial services, agriculture inputs, extension, market linkage, e-commerce, and payment services

It recently launched a marketplace to increase the productivity of 1,000,000 Smallholder Farmers in Nigeria. The ThriveAgric Marketplace is aimed at increasing local food production, boosting aggregation of farm produce in high demand, and enabling access to premium markets through trade and supply to domestic & global offtakers

The Visa Everywhere Initiative 2022 program has awarded over $530,000 in prize money globally over the course of the competition.