Kenyan Agtech Shamba Pride Raises $3.7 Million Fund to Expand Merchant Network
Shamba Pride, a Kenyan Agtech company that connects smallholder farmers to services technology-powered digishops, has raised $3.7 million in debt-equity pre-series A funding round, to fund its growth.
The funding comes from the EU agriculture financing initiative EDFI AgriFI and Seedstars Africa Ventures (SAV). Of the total funding, $1.7 million is in equity. This funding follows a previous capital raise of $1.1 million in 2021 from SAV and Gray Matters Capital.
Speaking on the funding round, general partner at SAV, Maxime Bouan said,
“Shamba Pride’s success is based on innovations which facilitate day-to-day farming activities. We’ve been proud to support a scalable model which creates additional revenues for farmers and agrovets (agro-dealers) and strongly contributes to successful women entrepreneurship”.
Also speaking on the startup mission, Shamba Pride founder and CEO Samuel Munguti said,
“Agriculture distribution in rural communities is heavily controlled by agro-dealers who decide how farmers access inputs, services, and training. We are empowering these agro-dealers by giving them the right tools and technology for visibility of their businesses, for their professional and commercial development, and the right support for farmers around them”.
Shamba Pride solves the supply chain between input manufacturers, agri-retailers, and farmers through online to offline commerce platforms. This removes the need for many intermediaries, significantly lowering the cost of farming to farmers while solving decade-long price exploitation, quality, and information access challenges.
The startup has over 60,000 registered farmers and 2,700 agri-retailers. Through creating a reliable and efficient ecosystem in this $1triilion industry in Sub-Sahara Africa, Shamba Pride aims to revolutionize the rural agriculture trade.
The startup is revolutionizing the rural agriculture trade ecosystem by offering online to an offline platform that provides tools and technology to agricultural input distributors (“agro-dealers”) to upskill them to provide quality agricultural products, services, and information to their farmers.
Shamba pride’s key purpose is to economically and socially empower and elevate farming communities at the grassroots level throughout Africa.
