Wefarm, a farmer-to-farmer digital network currently in Kenya and Uganda has secured $5 million in additional seed funding, led by Silicon-Valley based True Ventures, Skype and Atomico Founder Niklas Zennström, angel investing in a personal capacity, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg, Blue Bottle Coffee CEO Bryan Meehan, and the Norrsken Foundation, have all joined the round, along with significant follow on investment from LocalGlobe and Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV).
Wefarm is a crowdsourced peer-to-peer network for offline communities. Over 500 million small-scale farmers produce over 70 percent of the world’s food and spend over $400 billion on farm inputs and other services, annually.
Yet, they are often ignored by the global markets, services and leaders creating solutions to agricultural problems. Wefarm is reversing that reality by placing the voices of these farmers back into the heart of global agriculture.
Wefarm is currently operating in Kenya and Uganda with plans to expand into other areas of Eastern and Sub-Saharan Africa imminently.
Through Wefarm, farmers can ask questions in their own language on anything related to agriculture, from battling a crop disease or an infestation of army worm, to best practices for growing cash crops such as maize, tomatoes, coffee and tea. It uses the power of the crowd to source the very best content and knowledge from the network of farmers, even via SMS.
Wefarm says it will use this round of funding to develop commercial product offerings and build a new set of features.
