A Dutch agtech startup Almacena Platform, a marketplace for African agricultural products, has bagged €3.5 million in an equity round. The seed round was co-led by Eleven Ventures (that invested in Payhawk) and European early-stage VC VentureFriends (that invested in Carmoola), and Acequia Capital (that invested in Pandas and Volta, among others).
Expansion plans ahead
In the next 12 months, Almacena aims to offer a seamless coffee-sourcing experience to large-scale buyers globally. The funding will be used to expand further in Africa, add South American origins, and expand services to American buyers. The AlmacenaOrigin App will be expanded with more data insight tools and predictive models, and the company will launch an Inventory management app to complement the TradeDashboard, thus creating a fully transparent and digitised coffee sourcing channel.
Almacena’s co-founder and CEO Dimo Yanchev said, “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.”
Ivaylo Simov, Founding Partner at Eleven Ventures said, “Dimo and his team are taking into the next age a legacy trading business. Almacena is riding a new wave of b2b marketplaces in the food category, offering traceability, sustainability and finclusion elements as part of its business model. Eleven is excited to help the company grow exponentially in a multi billion dollar market, laying the ground for a very ambitious trading as a service platform for multiple agri products.”
George Dimopoulos, Partner at VentureFriends said, ”Almacena is adding clear value to both suppliers and buyers of green coffee, facilitating the transaction by improving efficiency, adding transparency and digitising the entire process. We are happy to join the journey and support the Almacena team in their mission to disrupt this space.”
Digitises agricultural supply chains
Co-founded by Dimo Yanchev and Karl Robijns in 2018 in the Netherlands, Almacena Platform is at the forefront of the digital transformation of the agricultural supply chains creating a level playing field for all supply chain participants.
It is a tech-enabled B2B marketplace for agricultural products that offers a one-stop solution to sellers and buyers of container traded commodities. Its customer base includes origin producers and exporters, some of the world’s biggest traders and leading industry buyers. The platform connects industrial buyers directly to origin suppliers from its offices in The Netherlands, Belgium and six East African countries. By mitigating supply chain risks to allow producers to directly reach the end buyers, it makes trading as a service possible, profitable and sustainable.
The next generation coffee sourcing hub allows buyers to procure coffee directly from the producers, negotiate terms, sign contracts and execute the deals digitally. Its proprietary Trade Dashboard integrates finance, storage, logistics, insurance and data collection from the African producer to the European warehouse or factory.
In under two years, Almacena registered the world’s largest online African supplier catalogue representing 12% of total African coffee export capacity and expanded into 6 African and 11 European markets.
