Almacena Platform, a Dutch ag-tech startup that operates a marketplace for African agricultural products, has bagged €3.5 million (circa US$3,402,350) in an equity round. The seed round was co-led by Eleven Ventures, European early-stage VC VentureFriends, and Acequia Capita.
The funds will be used to expand further in Africa, add new origins from South America and expand services to American buyers. Additional data analysis tools and predictive models will be added to the AlmacenaOrigin app. The company will then launch an inventory management app to complement the TradeDashboard and create a digitised coffee sourcing channel.
The platform enables buyers to purchase coffee directly from producers, negotiate terms, sign contracts and complete transactions digitally. The proprietary Trade Dashboard combines financing, storage, logistics, insurance and data collection from the African producer to the European warehouse or factory.
Almacena’s mission is to create sustainable and transparent agriculture supply chains.
The way agri commodities, like coffee, reach the end market has not changed for hundreds of years and resulted in economic and social inefficiencies that we are ready to solve. The new technologies and the wider spread use of the Internet in remote rural communities allow us to redesign the supply chain. We believe that in the future commodity trading will be disbanded to allow for service competition, direct procurement and value redistribution. Almacena aims to lead that change, starting with coffee. This round will help us to prove on a global basis that disintermediation in agriculture supply chains works.
Dimo Yanchev, Co-founder and CEO, Almacena
Founded in 2018 by Dimo Yanchev and Karl Robijns in the Netherlands, Almacena Platform is a technology-enabled B2b marketplace for agricultural products that provides a one-stop shop for sellers and buyers of goods traded in containers. Customers include growers and exporters as well as some of the world’s largest traders and buyers in the industry. From its offices in the Netherlands, Belgium and six East African countries, the platform connects industrial buyers directly with originating suppliers.
In less than two years, Almacena has built the world’s largest online catalogue of African suppliers, covering 12% of total African coffee export capacity, and expanded into six African and eleven European markets.
