By Onome Amuge
- unveils new technologies to drive profitability for consumer goods manufacturers
Releaf, a Nigerian agri tech start-up that develops proprietary hardware and software solutions for African farmers and food factories,has raised $3.3 million in an oversubscribed Pre-Series A funding round.
The funding round was led by Samurai Incubate Africa, who re-invested after leading Releaf’s seed round, with participation from Consonance Investment managers. Stephen Pagliuca, chairman of Bain Capital and Jeff Ubben, board member at World Wildlife Fund and founder of Inclusive Capital Partners also invested.
The new funding will support the launch of two new technologies: Kraken II – a portable version of its award-winning palm nut de-sheller and SITE – a geospatial mapping application that informs the most profitable positioning of food processing assets.
The application leverages cutting-edge geospatial mapping tools to determine how much oil palm is planted in an area and their annual yields, alongside Releaf’s proprietary data on soil type, rainfall, farmer productivity and 3rd-party data from organisations like the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Foundation for Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta (PIND) and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) to deliver a dynamic view of farming activity.
As part of its commitment to make it easier for consumer goods manufacturers in Africa to access high-quality ingredients for their factories, Releaf will use the dynamic data set to train Reinforcement Learning Models in SITE that identify the most optimal positioning of supply chain infrastructure for consumer goods manufacturers, creating an effective link with Africa’s decentralized farming system.
Kraken II is a portable, lower-cost version of Releaf’s Kraken – West Africa’s most advanced palm nut de-sheller. It is just as efficient as its static predecessor, costs half as much and can attain 3x profitability because it can be transported to high density farming areas, eliminating more than 80 percent of margin-eroding logistics costs.
The combination of Kraken II’s portability and SITE’s placement and route planning capabilities enables Releaf to target the best opportunities across Nigeria’s oil palm belt rather than being limited to sourcing crops within 100 kilometers of a fixed processing site like existing food processors.
Uzoma Ayogu, chief technology officer and co-founder of Releaf,remarked that “SITE and Kraken II are the next steps in the company’s plan to fundamentally transform the efficiency of agricultural supply chains in Africa. He added that the company is excited to have partnered with an exceptional cohort of investors and collaborators to roll out these technologies.
Ayogu noted that utilising extraction yields with leading processing technology and minimizing logistics costs by bringing processing capacity closer to farmers are necessary to make food supply chains profitable.
“Before Releaf, stakeholders had to choose between one or the other – large factories had great technology but were far away, leaving most farmers with rudimentary technology to process their crops. We’re now able to maximize both,” he said.
Rena Yoneyama, managing partner at Samurai Incubate Africa, in his remark, said Releaf’s success with its pilot Kraken validates its thesis, adding that Samurai is excited to continue supporting their ambitious vision to create efficient supply chains within Africa’s agricultural market.
“They have added key members to their management team and continue to impress us with their rapid commercial growth and technological development. We look forward to more of the same success as the team rolls out Kraken II and SITE,” Yoneyama said.
On his part, David Lobell from Stanford University said he enjoyed working with Releaf and using the tree height algorithm to establish the correlation between oil palm age and height to help farmers to get a better understanding of their future yields and make better data-driven decisions on sustainable replanting.
Lobell said there is a great opportunity to unlock Africa’s unique agricultural potential by leveraging remote sensing solutions, noting that the partnership with Releaf will be a catalyst.
According to Releaf, Africa will represent 40 per cent of the human population by the end of the 21st century and the fast-moving consumer goods market will emerge as its first globally relevant industrial sector.
Releaf said its technology is designed to accelerate this industrialization while ensuring inclusive success for the planet, farmers, food factories, and consumers in one of the greatest economic opportunities globally.
Since launching in 2021, Releaf has used its supply chain technology to process more than 10 million kilogrammes of palm nuts and grown its monthly revenue 7X year on year, while its valuation has tripled since its seed round a year ago.
The company has also secured over $100 million in supply contracts from leading consumer goods manufacturers, including Presco, PZ Cussons, and more.
