Venture capital fund 500 Startups and early stage investor East Ventures have invested an undisclosed amount in Indonesian agtech startup, iGrow.
Founded in 2014 by Jim Oklahoma, Muhaimin Iqbal, and Andreas Senjaya , iGrow, which has been described as, “Farmville for real life”, is a large scale micro-financing platform. Urban investors invest a small amount of money to back a farmer who will then plant a crop of the investor’s choice. Upon the harvest of the crop, the investor will receive a return on investment commensurate with the crop that is being grown and a pre-established timeline.
“The idea came from our day to day problem, which is (how to provide) massive food supplies for Indonesia’s 250 million population,” co-founder and CEO Muhaimin Iqbal told Forbes. “We have enough fertile land but we import so much food supplies, because a lot of our land is idle or underutilized, therefore we want to maximize the land utilization and to improve the environment as well.”
Independent supervisors verify the proper operation of the farms and investors, or ‘sponsors’, can access a dashboard that shows information in real time regarding the farm in which they have invested. The platform allows for the sustainable production of organic food, sustainable income for smallholders and ensure the proper use of under-utilized farmland.
“There is still 16 million hectares of under-utilized land in Indonesia, therefore we believe the opportunity is enormous here,” Jim Oklahoma, Chief of Business Development, told e27 in a written statement. “Along with local expansion, we are also exploring to open our farm and market in other countries approximately by the end of this year.”
iGrow is currently cultivating more than 1,000 hectares of underutilized land and has harvested 350 tons of high-quality crops, reports Deal Street Asia. However, the startup intends to use the funds raised to support overseas expansion with a focus on olive farming in Turkey and possibly into Japan.
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Lynda Kiernan
