South African Agri-Tech SwiftVEE Raises $1.5m Find to Expand Market

By Adedapo Adesanya

South African agri-tech startup, swiftVEE, has raised a $1.5 million funding round it will use to expand into neighbouring countries and expand its platform.

Founded in 2019 and selected for the Google Launchpad Africa accelerator in the same year, swiftVEE conducts real-time online livestock auctions. So far, the startup has done over 150 auctions, and it has 125,000 farmers in its network.

swiftVEE uses artificial intelligence (AI) to match buyers and sellers of livestock from anywhere in the world to help buyers acquire livestock at the most optimal times and hopes to expand its use of AI after securing the funding.

The $1.5 million investment comes from Subtropico, an unlisted private company in the food industry, and will also be used to help the startup expand into Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe.

Speaking on the next phase, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of swiftVEE, Mr Russel Luck noted, “The future of food security is understanding the production cycle of livestock from farm-to-fork and this is our next major focus.”

“There has been an interest expressed to have our operations expand overseas, and we’d like to go into the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) and apply machine learning solutions to foreign markets,” he added.

“Our aim is to optimise trade between the buyers and sellers of livestock with the use of artificial intelligence technology and bring foreign livestock buyers to South African markets. By pursuing this aim, we solve bigger problems caused by a lack of trading efficiency within the livestock trading sector (problems such as resource scarcity/food insecurity/global hunger),” he said further.

Last year, a total of 12 startups from across Africa were selected to participate in the inaugural edition, including swiftVEE.

Others include six from Nigeria: parenting community platform Babymigo, payments service Kudi, e-books service OkadaBooks, savings platform Piggybank.ng, P2P banking platform Riby, and agricultural crowdfunding platform Thrive Agric.

Kenya was represented by two startups, namely layaway e-commerce system Flexpay and P2P microlending platform Pezesha, while there are also representatives from Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda in the form of media platform OMG Digital, VoD service TangoTv and e-health platform Teheca.