Kenyan Agritech Shamba Pride Raises USD 3.7 M Pre-Series A Round

Shamba Pride, a Kenyan agritech startup that seeks to enhance last-mile distribution for farm inputs and tackle price exploitation and quality issues for farmers through its merchant network dubbed digishops, has raised a USD 3.7 M debt-equity pre-series A funding from the EU agriculture financing initiative EDFI AgriFI and Seedstars Africa Ventures (SAV). 

Shamba Pride digitizes agro-dealers to power various tasks including business management and inventory ordering, which ensures the availability of supplies like fertilizers and seeds to millions of small-scale farmers in rural areas. The agritech has, so far, built a network of merchants (agro-dealers) extending across 24 counties in Kenya, which represents just over half of the country. It now plans to scale further into the country to cover more retailers and agricultural regions in the next one year, and later explore neighboring markets like Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia, which have similar farm input supply chain challenges, like sourcing, unpredictable prices, quality challenges and stockouts.