Entrepreneurship Zone: 04 June 2020: Meet The Agritech Entrepreneurs Who Just Raised $6 Million To Help Farmers In Kenya Grow Their Business

Thu Jun 4 06:27:57 CAT 2020

 <http://www.zb.co.zw/> Between 2011 and 2014, engineer and Stanford grad Eli Pollak worked in agricultural technology in the U.S. for a company called the Climate Corporation. The enterprise where he was one of the early employees (which in 2013 was acquired by Monsanto for over $1 billion) worked on providing customized recommendations to increase production of large scale commercial farmers. What caught Pollak’s eye during his tenure at the company, however, was that some countries were planting way more seeds, but producing dramatically less agricultural products than the U.S.

This prompted Pollak to team up with Climate Corporation colleague Earl St Sauver, and Benjamin Ngenga (who himself grew up on a farm) to start Apollo Agriculture, a Kenyan ag-tech company which uses machine learning and automated operations technology to help small-scale farmers access everything they need to maximize their profitability.

In late May, Apollo Agriculture raised $6 million in a Series A round. The round was led by Anthemis Exponential Ventures, with participation from Leaps by Bayer, Flourish Ventures (a venture of The Omidyar Group), Sage Hill Capital, To Ventures Food, Breyer Labs, and existing investors Accion Venture Lab and Newid Capital, among others.

Small scale farmers across Africa don't have fundamental agricultural tools and financing that they need to increase their profitability,” Pollak, who serves as the company’s CEO, says. “So the challenge is less ‘how do we help farmers increase their production’, and much more ‘how do we help them access the tools’ which we already know would drastically increase their production.”

Both Pollak and St Sauver, who works as Apollo’s CTO, were featured on the 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs list in 2018.  

Apollo Agriculture provides an optimized bundle for farmers that includes advice, insurance, farming products, and financing. Customers apply for the loan, after which they receive a phone call from someone at Apollo. From there, the company sends one of the 650 field  contractors who visit the farm, verify the farmer’s identity and walk the GPS boundaries of their field. That data then sinks back to Apollo’s system where we are able to verify it for data quality purposes.

Apollo then makes a credit decision, and if the farmer is approved for the loan based on their machine learning models, they receive a voucher code which the farmer can redeem in one of the 250 agriculture retailers in Kenya. 

Left to Right: Eli Pollak (CEO), Benjamin Njenga (Chief Customer Officer, Earl St. Sauver (CTO)

 APOLLO AGRICULTURE

Apollo doesn’t provide farmers with cash, but rather provides the farmers with seeds and fertilizers, which the farmers pay back via mobile payment after the harvest. 

The two ways in which the company generates revenue are the sale of agricultural products in the bundle, as well as the microfinancing. The ag-tech enterprise currently has 40,000 farmers, of which 25,000 have joined in 2020.

One of the main things about the agricultural business and for farmers, per Pollak, is that they need a holistic solution. 

Retailer using Apollo's app to checkout a farmer.

 APOLLO AGRICULTURE

“If you’re farming and I tell you ‘here’s the perfect seed and fertilizer’ but then it doesn't rain, you still have a bad year. Or if I tell you ‘hey here’s the seed and fertilizer and you get great rain, but you plant it wrong you still get a bad production,” Pollak says. “We tried to solve many, if not all challenges that a farmer faces, so they can realize the significant increase in production.” 

The Nairobi-based company currently hires over 100 people, and with the $6 million Series A round, the total funding has grown to $7.6 million.

Kenyan farmers, clients of Apollo Agriculture

 APOLLO AGRICULTURE

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