Releaf, a Nigerian agritech company that supplies ingredients to African food factories, has secured a $3.3 million Pre-Serie A funding.
The supply chain technology company said it secured the fund to support the launch of its two new technologies it is introducing to the African market.
The technologies includes: Kraken II and SITE.
According to Releaf, the two new technologies will “drive profitability for consumer goods manufacturers in Africa.”
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“Kraken II is a portable version of our award-winning palm nut de-sheller and SITE is a geospatial mapping app that informs the most profitable positioning of food processing assets.”
“They are the next steps in our plan to fundamentally transform Africa’s agricultural supply chains,” Releaf said in a statement.
The Investors:
The Pre-Serie A funding was led by Samurai Incubate Africa. Other participating investors include Consonance Investment Managers.
Others include Stephen Pagliuca (Chairman of Bain Capital) and Jeff Ubben (Board member at World Wildlife Fund and Founder of Inclusive Capital Partners).
More About Releaf:
The supply chain technology company based in Uyo, the capital of Akwa-Ibom in Nigeria, said in a statement that “We’re on a mission to build climate-adaptive supply chains as Africa’s population increases by 3 billion.”
It continued by noting that “We are starting by making vegetable oil cheaper and supplying it to Nigerian Food Factories.”
The technologies by the agritech company help smallholder farmers in the processing of cheaper and high-quality palm oil for the Nigerian market.
This is a development away from the initial crude method of palm oil processing that is not environmentally friendly.
According to the company, its Kraken technology which is a portable palm nut de-sheller, that reduces 80% margin-eroding cost.
It also helps in processing palm nuts and extracting “high-quality palm kernel oil.”
Similarly, the SITE technology is Releaf’s second latest machine that helps in route planning or goespatial mapping and age identification of palm trees in Nigeria.
Founded in 2017, Releaf forms a link between smallholder farmers and food factories. It also supplies palm oil to consumer goods manufacturers and their food factories.
Meanwhile, having observed the challenges smallholder farmers face in trying to source for funds to scale their growths, Releaf comes in to take out this challenge.
Consequently, the agritech company provides funding to farmers to help them scale their growth.
In an interview with media personalities, Releaf Co-founder, Mr Uzoma Ayogu noted explained the benefits to farmers saying:
“The biggest benefit to them with this new evolution of Kraken and SITE is that many offer farmers poor prices because they have to pay a lot for logistics.
“But now that we can eliminate 80% of the logistics costs and process much closer to the farmers, we can pass a lot of that profit back to them while also keeping more of it for ourselves while improving even the quality of the end product.”
Recall that in September 2021, Releaf had raised $4.2 million funding to scale its food processing technology and the recent fund raise further increased its valuation.
So far, the startup has secured over %100 million funding.
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