Thrive Agric, Nigeria’s agritech startup has been invited along with a set of 23 companies to make up the 2019 Winter batch of over 200 companies. YCombinator is one of the world’s most successful accelerators. They have crossed ₦36 trillion ($100 billion) in market value across all the startups in their portfolio since 2005. Some of the YC alumni include Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit.
Thrive Agric provides microloans, agricultural best practices and a premium market for Nigerian farmers to sell their produces. It also offers an investment platform where they can access fund for either livestock or crop farming. Crowd-sourced individual investors can fund a single farm for about ₦85,000 ($236) to earn interests as high as 15% in 6 months and longer durations of 9 months command higher interest rates of 20%. Thrive Agric’s returns are more lucrative when compared to other investment vehicles like treasury bills, mutual funds and online savings fintechs with an average annual rate of 13%.
Y Combinator is an American seed accelerator, started in March 2005. Since then, it has spawned a number of highly successful programs with a focus on founders and helping them on further developing their product, team, market, refining their business model, achieving product/market fit, and scaling their startups into high growth businesses. It interviews and selects two batches of companies per year. The companies receive seed money, advice, and connections in exchange for 7% equity.
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The startups move to Silicon Valley for 3 months, get coached by mentors and experienced entrepreneurs in refining their business model and pitch to investors. Every year, YC runs a summer and winter batch. Each cycle culminates in a Demo Day where the startups present their companies to an invite-only audience and investors. YC also invests ₦54 million ($150,000) in the startups that pass through their programme for a 7% ownership of the company.
Nigeria has over 32 million small farmers, many of which are underserved by the financial system and constrained by capital. According to recent research by Digest Africa, 13 of the 28 African startups in the YCombinator program over the last 10 years have been Nigerian. This means Nigerian startups account for 46.3% of African startups in the program since 2009. Ghana, the African country with the second most cohorts accounts for around 17.9%. Thrive Agric Ltd. has gained decent traction in less than two years of incorporation. In February alone, they funded farmers with over ₦180 million ($500,000) and has reportedly achieved a 50% month-on-month growth rate.
Years of continuous improvement and persistence did pay off as the Nigerian agritech startup finally received an invitation to be part of YC’s 2019 winter batch. The winter batch which started on January 3, has its Demo Day set for March 19. With the corresponding raise, the company is also looking to invest in its online platform’s engineering. After Demo Day, Thrive Agric will now join the league of other Nigerian startups like fintechs Paystack and Flutterwave to have graduated from the global accelerator.