By Modupe Gbadeyanka
An early-stage company focused on solving Africa’s environmental data gap, Amini, has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding in an oversubscribed round led by Pale Blue Dot, a leading European Climate Tech fund.
The firm intends to deploy artificial intelligence and satellite technology to provide reliable and trustworthy data, which has held back Africa’s development for decades by hampering business decisions and capital allocation as well as making it difficult to measure the impact of climate change.
Other investors that pumped funds into Amini were Superorganism, RaliCap, W3i, Emurgo Kepple Ventures and a network of angel investors from the global technology community.
Amini was designed to address Africa’s data scarcity, facilitate capital investment, promote climate resilience, and accelerate economic development opportunities in the region.
It has found its first customers in the agricultural insurance sector, using the platform’s granular, verifiable, and actionable data for enhancing farmers’ resilience through parametric agricultural insurance coverage.
With a focus on regenerative agriculture, this collaboration aims to support both African farmers and global food chains.
Within the first six months of operation, the company has developed a robust data aggregation and analytics platform capable of collecting, unifying, and processing satellite data, weather data, and other types of data down to a square meter.
The platform provides access to valuable environmental data analytics, including drought, flood, soil and crop health. This data can be processed to forecast crop yields for millions of smallholder farmers in mere seconds, as well as measure the impact of natural disasters across the region.
Africa, home to 65 per cent of the world’s uncultivated fertile land and 30 per cent of its mineral resources, accounts for only 3% of the global GDP.
“The scarcity of high-quality environmental data in Africa is a concern as it prevents others from building important climate solutions such as for example, improving farmer insurance, monitoring climate risk or supply chains.
“When meeting the team behind Amini, we were blown away by their ambition and expertise, and we believe they are best positioned to fill the environmental data gap of Africa,” the General Partner for Pale Blue Dot, Heidi Lindvall, said.
The founder and CEO of Amini, Kate Kallot, said, “We are building the single source of truth for environmental data across Africa. Data has the potential to transform livelihoods by enabling everything from climate resilience to sustainable value chains. Should Amini reach its full potential and solve this problem, we are setting up Africa for tremendous transformation and development over the next decade.
“It’s a long way to get there, but the early customer success and interest from global enterprises, governments and international organizations are showing us that we’re on the right track.”
Adedapo Adesanya