Nigerian startup Farm365 is a vegetable and fruit box delivery marketplace that sources quality farm produce directly from rural farmers and sells to businesses in urban areas. Launched in 2020, Farm365 work closely with rural farmers to rescue seasonal vegetables from waste, connecting sellers with customers via its digital platform. Business or private customers are able to select what produce they want and have it delivered to their door using the platform, with Farm365 already working with six B2B and 11 B2C customers.
Now, the company is looking for pre-seed funding as it bids to eradicate food wastage. Abdulaziz Kabir, founder of Farm365: “A third of the food grown in the world is wasted. We believe this has to stop; all food grown must be eaten. More than 40 per cent of what is harvested in the rural communities is wasted in the field as a result of inaccessible markets and ineffective logistics services.”
The startup aims to address this, and having seen some uptake is now seeking funding to scale more quickly. Bootstrapped since inception, it is now starting a pre-seed raise to help it achieve product market fit and continue to build what customers want.
“We have more than 300 vegetable growers across the country working with us,” Kabir told disrupt-africa.com. “Looking at the processes involved across the value chain, a lot of tasks are done before food is set on the table – scouting for rural farmers, travelling to various farm clusters across the country. As a company working on the food-to-fork process, we make sure we streamline our operations through quality, effective logistics’, cleaning, sorting, weighing and packaging. We have partners that help in easing the process starting from the farms, logistics and warehousing.”