Agriculture might be the world’s oldest industry, but it’s still mostly stuck in analogue mode. Even though the global agrifood sector pulls in over $8 trillion a year, less than 1% of B2B ag deals actually happen online.
Think about it: fintech deals close in minutes, freight in hours, and agricultural transactions often take over 45 days. They rely on phone calls and faxes, with layers of middlemen adding costs. Meanwhile, the people growing our food, farmers, are left with just 10 to 20 cents for every dollar we spend.
That’s the gap Wikifarmer wants to close. The Athens-based team just landed €7.1M in fresh funding, led by Brighteye Ventures and Piraeus Bank, with Point Nine Capital and Metavallon VC.
This brings Wikifarmer’s total funding to $18M, fueling their AI push, expansion plans, and the launch of FarmClick, a new farm-input marketplace built together with Piraeus Bank.
Ambitious? Absolutely. But can they pull it off?
From the “Wikipedia of farming” to a full B2B marketplace
Wikifarmer’s story doesn’t start like a typical agritech playbook.
Back in 2017, co-founders Ilias Sousis (ex-Google, serial entrepreneur) and Petros Sagos (agronomist, family seeds business) started things off in Athens with just information, creating so-called “Wikipedia of farming.”
Sousis tells TFN, “Petros came to me with the idea of creating something like the Wikipedia of farming. At first, I thought he was crazy because I assumed such a resource already existed. There are wiki sites for almost everything.”
Drawing on Sousis’s Google search analytics experience, they identified the most-searched agricultural questions worldwide and created expert, multilingual content to answer them. The result was a free educational resource that grew to millions of users, and, more strategically, built a trusted, pre-qualified supply base that would later anchor the marketplace’s seller side.
Instead of chasing supply with incentives or sales teams, Wikifarmer built loyalty the old-fashioned way: by being genuinely useful. And in an industry where trust and relationships are everything, that loyal base became as valuable as any algorithm.
The infrastructure problem no one talks about
Most agritech pitches focus on the front end: cleaner interfaces, better price discovery, and faster matching. Wikifarmer’s advantage lies in the operational backbone, the complex layer between a buyer clicking “purchase” and a container of olive oil arriving at a port in Rotterdam.
“It’s not just about buyers finding products, negotiating, and purchasing. A full cycle of operations must be managed, which used to happen by phone and offline,” Sousis explains.
That cycle includes quality certifications and inspections, coordinating logistics, trade finance, and credit risk checks, handling compliance paperwork, and managing price changes.
In mature B2B sectors, such as chemicals, industrial components, and even pharmaceuticals, this layer has been substantially digitised.
In agriculture, however, it hasn’t changed much. One reason is the sheer heterogeneity of what’s being traded: a container of Egyptian oranges requires different certifications, cold-chain handling, and phytosanitary documentation than a shipment of Greek olive oil or Romanian grain.
The AI layer: real advantage or just a buzzword?
Wikifarmer is automating logistics, scanning quality docs with AI, and running predictive models for prices and arrival times. Every deal feeds more data back into the system: a flywheel that, if it scales, could make them tough to copy.
According to Sousis, the new funding round is focused on speeding up AI development. The near-term plan moves away from a basic browse-and-filter marketplace to a conversational model powered by large language models. Buyers just say what they need, and the system matches them with the right suppliers, taking into account location, order history, quality, and logistics.
“If you visit our website now, it still feels like an old-school marketplace. Our next step is to focus more on large language models. Customers will just say what they want, and our algorithm will match them with the right supplier,” Sousis says.
It’s a vision that aligns with where many B2B marketplaces are headed, from industrials to speciality chemicals. The real test is whether the data is deep enough to make AI matching actually better than a solid search filter.
In commodity B2B, matching is all about data. Platforms with thousands of well-documented deals can recommend better than those with just a few hundred. Wikifarmer’s educational roots give them a head start on supplying data, but building up buyer transaction history, especially for those big container deals, takes time.
Automating all those container-level trade tasks, routing, paperwork, compliance, and financing, is where AI could really move the needle and give Wikifarmer an edge that’s tough to replicate.
Competition: who’s really in the game?
Sousis’s view of the competition is mostly accurate but a bit convenient. He’s right that the biggest competitor is inertia: the retiring generation of purchasing managers who rely on personal relationships and phone deals. He’s also right that European agri B2B marketplaces at Wikifarmer’s stage and scale are rare.
But zoom out, and the landscape is a lot more crowded than it looks.
In Southeast Asia, platforms like Tanihub (Indonesia) and DeHaat (India) have raised much larger funds while pursuing similar full-stack models and have faced tough lessons about fragmented logistics, farmer trust, and financing risks that matter everywhere.
In the US, Indigo Ag’s well-funded shift away from its original marketplace model is a warning about the gap between big ambitions in agricultural commerce and the reality of execution.
In Europe, the real threat might not be other startups, but the big trading houses and agri-input distributors quietly rolling out their own digital tools. Wikifarmer isn’t just up against old-school middlemen: the incumbents have the financing, logistics, and buyer trust locked down. Tech can be copied, but relationships take years.
A generational shift is opening doors. Sousis says, “Many purchasing managers are retiring, and a new generation is stepping in. I believe this will be the tipping point for the whole industry. It actually helps educate the market. After that, it’s about who gets the technology right, and I believe we have some secret weapons.”
The bigger bet
Perhaps the most interesting part of this funding round isn’t the AI development but the Piraeus Bank partnership and the co-launched FarmClick platform.
It suggests a repeatable model: partnering with agricultural lenders in target markets to co-launch input marketplaces, leveraging the bank’s existing farmer relationships for distribution and its financing services as a key advantage.
The $18 million raised so far is modest compared to the size of the problem and the cost of building logistics and trade finance infrastructure on a continental scale.
The next 18 months are the real test: can the AI marketplace drive up deal volume, can FarmClick prove the bank partnership model, and can Wikifarmer expand without losing the quality that container-level buyers demand?
If it works in Greece, this approach could be used in other markets where agricultural banks play a similar central role, like parts of Latin America, North Africa, and Central Europe.
