Kenyan peer-to-peer (P2P) farming information platform WeFarm is raising a GB£2 million (US$2.9 million) series A funding round, following strong uptake in Kenya, and its first successful pan-African launch in Uganda last month.
WeFarm launched in Kenya in November 2014, after spinning out of an NGO, and offers a P2P knowledge sharing platform for small-scale farmers in rural communities, which allows farmers to ask questions via SMS shortcodes and receive answers from other registered users.
The platform is open to anyone, including experts and those wishing to do business with farmers, and is available in both English and Swahili.
Only a little over a year old, WeFarm has already hit 43,000 users on its platform, and has seen over 100,000 answers shared on the platform. There have been over five million interactions via the system to date.
In response to the strong uptake, WeFarm last month launched in Uganda, and has seen 5,000 users sign up to the platform within the month.
“After our success with Kenya, we were keen to replicate the model in another country in East Africa. With a population of almost 40 million people, Uganda represents a huge opportunity for WeFarm. 5,000 farmers have registered in less than a month, so it’s definitely demonstrating that there is an appetite for a peer-to-peer service in Africa beyond just Kenya,” Kenny Ewan, chief executive officer (CEO) of WeFarm told Disrupt Africa.
However, the Ugandan launch is just the first step in the startup’s international expansion plans for the year, which stretch not only across Africa – with launches in Tanzania and the Ivory Coast on the horizon-, but across the world, with potential launches in India, Brazil, and Colombia in the pipeline.
To facilitate these plans, WeFarm is currently raising a GB£2 million (US$2.9 million) series A funding round, which the startup says will allow it to scale up and achieve one million users on the platform by the end of 2016.
Last week, WeFarm was named one of Disrupt Africa’s 12 African startups to watch in 2016.
