Innovation in African Agriculture: what does the data tell us?

In Rabat, Briter x AgBase presented and led the Paris Peace Forum's Innovation in African Agriculture roundtable, contributing to ATLAS, the Agricultural Transitions Lab for African Solutions. The discussion centred on a question that AgBase data makes increasingly hard to ignore: why does genuine farmer demand not translate into scale?

The data tells a clear story. African agtech funding peaked in 2022 and has since stabilised at around $200 million annually, a structural reset rather than a temporary dip. The gap is sharpest at the pre-Series A bridge, where companies moving beyond grant funding into the $250K–$2M range find little available capital, and again at the $10M+ growth stage, where fewer than 10% of funded ventures have ever reached. Compounding this, agtech capital continues to flow to investment-ready markets rather than to countries with the highest agricultural value add, leaving Ethiopia, Tanzania and others chronically underfunded relative to their agricultural weight.

What emerged from the roundtable discussion was that the constraint is rarely the technology itself. Procurement pathways, working capital structures and financing infrastructure remain the missing links. Farmer-facing and asset-heavy models in particular are poorly served by equity alone, requiring instruments that reflect agricultural operating cycles: working capital lines, blended finance, local-currency debt and patient capital. Agtechs that have embedded financial services into their platforms are already attracting a disproportionate share of funding, capturing nearly two-thirds of capital despite representing only a quarter of companies, precisely because they generate the transaction and repayment data that lenders can underwrite. The roundtable made clear that closing the scale gap will require building those data and financing rails across the ecosystem, not just within individual companies.

Download the slides we presented during the roundable.