Interview with GrowForMe Founder & CEO Nana Prempeh

My name is Dustin Betts. I'm the Community and Content Manager for the Founder Institute, and I'm here today with Nana Prempeh. He's the founder and CEO of Grow4Me. They're an FI Ghana and Founder Institute Select portfolio company that has developed an agricultural crowdfunding platform for farmers to scale up their growing operations. Nana Prempeh, thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks, Dustin. It's a pleasure talking to you.

All right, so before we kind of dive into your startup growth, for me, I always like to ask our, our founders first, you know, tell me a little bit about yourself or your personal story. You know, what were the experiences, professional or personal, that led you to founding this, uh, company helping, uh, farmers in Ghana to crowdsource capital?

Yeah, so, um, I've always grown up as a little child, I always wanted to be a farmer. Um, I, I did my bachelor's degree in agric engineering and my master's in and machine systems, like engineering. And I spent the next 5 years after my MPhil, I mean, doing technology for fintechs, payment platforms for churches and for businesses. And after a while, I'm like, how do I bring technology and agriculture together? So then 3 of my friends and I decided to take a trip from Accra to Nigeria on bamboo bicycles, about 450 kilometers in 5 days. And we saw the great opportunity to, you know, fund farmers to produce more than they were doing and also to contribute into, you know, basically producing more food to meet the food requirements of a growing population. And we built Grow4Me. I mean, in one year we were able to achieve— I mean, less than one year, able to achieve amazing results. So my upbringing and my experience really has been a very critical factor in building this company.

Awesome. I love to hear that kind of confluence of, you know, having a background doing the payments and technology and bringing that back to something that you're passionate about. So it's really cool. I know because I'm already somewhat familiar with your company as a Founder Institute portfolio company that Grow For Me, you know, you guys are agricultural crowdfunding for farmers to scale up their growing operations. But let's hear it straight from you, the founder. Please kind of give us your short elevator pitch. You know, what is Grow For Me?

You just did, Dustin. You just gave the elevator pitch. Yeah, but basically we are crowdfunding and a crowdfarming and a trading platform. Basically, we crowdfund to enable farmers to farm, and then we trade the commodities to pay back sponsors a portion of the profits. So at the core, we are profit-sharing, crowdfunding, crowdfunding and trading platform.

Perfect. And so kind of tell us a little bit more in terms of the background of the company. You know, how long have you been around for and sort of what's that wider startup story?

Yeah, so, I mean, actually about 2 years ago, when I talked about the trip from Ghana to Nigeria, we saw that the core of the problem, farmers could not produce more because there was a lack of investments. And most of the young guys didn't want to do the very difficult things of breaking their backs and digging with a hoe and cutlass, when they could just be funded to, you know, plow using machinery, and then could do the easy work of, you know, planting and then harvesting. So we decided to say, look, what is the impact of this problem? We realized that the impact of farmers not being able to scale up means there was less food. And already, you know, there's a big food problem in Africa. I mean, out of the 1.3 million, we can feed everyone, but there's really vast lands to do so. So what we simply did was to, you know, experiment with our pineapple farm, had friends and family, you know, basically sponsor a pineapple farm and then in this 13-month cycle, we were able to pay them back. So prior to that, we realized the business model worked, and then we registered a company, built our technology, which included a crowdfunding platform and the satellite images from Airbus that allows us to see what's happening on the farm. And we basically, from June, started crowdfunding and crowdfunding and farming with our farmers. And it's been amazing. I mean, within a very short period, we've raised over 50,000 USD from July when we just started crowdfunding and funded well over 200 farmers and a significant number of acres. And we've also done about $3,800 of trading. So it's just amazing that there's a real need for such a solution. And with the right technology and the team, we've been able to significantly, you know, solve this problem.

Yeah, that's amazing. And I'll come back to kind of some of those traction metrics that you mentioned later because, yeah, that's really impressive, you know, early launch growth. But yeah, talk to me a little a little bit more about, I guess, your sort of mission and vision behind the company that, you know, I guess the impetus for, you know, unleashing this kind of like crowdfunding on the farmers, you know, what's the mission and vision that's motivating you?

Yeah, so our vision is to really make food affordable and accessible to all. So like I mentioned earlier, the population of Africa is about 1.3, others say 1.6, you know, and it's going to be about 2.5 billion by 2030. And if you're still struggling to feed the 1.6, 1.3 billion, what's going to happen to 2.5 billion people? That's going to be a very big challenge. So some people say the biggest challenge you're going to face will be water and food. And what's the best way to solve a communal problem? The community comes together and solves it. And in this case, what we are doing, which is aligning our vision to make food affordable and accessible to all, is by bringing the community that's both and people in Africa and Africans in the diaspora to pool funds together and to crowdfund. Why are we crowdfunding farming? Because when you look at the farming landscape in Africa, 70% of the farmers are smaller farmers. The smaller farmers are doing 1 to 5 acres, and typically it does manual labor. And after that, maybe 30 to 20% may be large-scale farmers who have tractors, harvesters, and planters. So majority of the food we consume on this continent is done by smallholder farmers. So crowdfunding allows us to now fund lots of smallholder farmers to move from 1 to 5, to 5 to 10, or 10 to 15 acres per farmer. That means you are increasing the food production by 2 or by 3, an average about 2.5 times what is being produced. And with that simple theory of change and maths, you can see that you can double the output the amount of food you are producing on the continent, hence aligning with our vision of making food affordable and accessible. Why affordable? When the food has enough quantity, what happens? Prices drop and people can now afford it. And now let me put this in context for our viewers. In most African households, over 60 to 70, 75% of their income is spent on food. That's a lot to spend over 60, 75% of your income on food. So what you have to do is to produce more so that prices drop. And people can now have extra money to do other things. Next, in the context of the farmer, he does not have very disposable income to plow and to, you know, you might say plow is just an easy thing. It's just gonna cost about $20 to plow per acre. So why is it big? It's a big issue for a smallholder farmer. So being able to crowdfund and provide the plowing and in return get a portion of the crops, which is then sold to pay you back, es the most practical and scalable method. And let me put this in context. Let's take cash crops like cocoa. Most people eat chocolate around the world. Did you know Ghana is the largest producing cocoa country in the world? Sometimes second to Côte d'Ivoire. It fluctuates. But Ghana raised about $1.3 billion every year to buy cocoa, sell it in the international market, and then pay back, I mean, the syndicates they're raising money from, and then basically pay back the farmer. Now, that means that a few people determine the price points of cocoa. And by the way, in the chocolate industry, producing countries like Ghana just make about 5% of the whole value of the industry. And why? Because the money to buy is from someone else, so he can determine the price. What if every African can be part of saying, hey, we are going to fund our own cocoa, you know, acquisition from our farmers, then giving them premium price, And we're going to play— take a very significant portion of the cocoa value chain and the market share. And it's only possible if we step in and finance our farmers and determine the prices so that there's more market equilibrium. So it's not a simple technology we built. We built something that's really going to revolutionize the industry, which is core to, you know, many African countries, because at the core, agriculture is a very significant portion of the GDP of most African countries. So in summary, our vision is to really make food affordable and accessible to all. And we do that by financing the smallholder farmer with funds from anyone who believes in this journey.

That's awesome. I really love, yeah, that, well, your vision is super supported by like data and metrics, which I love, like how, you know, grounded it really is. But also, yeah, really just great to see like the smallholder farmer is really at the center of that vision. It's all about empowering them. And I think like you talked about the scalability aspects, The very first statistic you mentioned, you know, 70% being small shareholder farmers, I think that's maybe quite different from like a Western kind of big agribusiness dominated. And so, yeah, the kind of theory for impact, as you say, is really, really interesting. And I love how that ties into your business model. I want to kind of dive in a little bit more about your matrix of sort of problems and solutions. So talk to me about some of the challenges that are faced, you know, by farmers, as well as by, you know, your sponsors and then your buyers of the crops.

Yes. So first of all, there are 3 people in our business. You have the farmer, the sponsor, and the buyer, the offtaker. So the farmer has limited access to credit facility because of course he's a smallholder farmer. He doesn't have to keep records. He just buys and sells what he needs to take care of his family. Next, the farmers are aging and the young guys who are supposed to take up after them are leaving the farming areas into the city to do very menial tasks. That means you have less labor in the farming industry. And next, you have very few large-scale farmers. Most of them have very small-scale farms. And finally, that means you have little labor, few farmers doing more, doing little. That means you have less food produced, which ultimately culminates in the hunger issues and the SDG 1 problems you're trying to solve. Now to the sponsor. Many people, many young people really want to be middle-income earners, and Africa is having a huge middle-income earner growth. In addition to the Africans in the diaspora. And many people want to do two things. Some people actually want to get into agriculture. They really wish they could, but they don't have the time or the skill. Whilst others literally want to see their money work for them on the continent. So when you take these two people, they have a common problem. They don't know where to put their money. They can't just trust any random person and give them money and say, go farm with it, no. And two, they don't have visibility on what's happening if they should fund a farm they are in maybe the US or the UK, they cannot see what's happening. And finally, lack critical knowledge or, you know, what it takes to really have a successful farming business. This is also the problem for the sponsor. Now finally, for the buyer, buyers or off-takers, as we call them, often find very poor quality on graded products in the market. So let's say a company in maybe US wants to buy maybe 1,000 tons of maize. How do they easily get it or source that from Ghana? It's a big challenge. They do not know how to do that. And they probably would be scratching their head on how to solve such a problem. And there's also limited visibility on where the crops are and how much of it's available. And there's also very high fluctuating prices because typically some people will hoard, so the off-taker may not get at the good price. And finally, there's also logistics issue between sourcing it from the farm, which is in a very rural hinterland areas, and getting it to the port and then shipping to the off-takers' destination, if it's out of the country or if it's locally, a local processor to his factory. And these are the problems that a farmer, a sponsor, and a buyer faces. So these 3 players who are actually critical in that industry have these problems I just listed.

That's awesome. Really, yeah, again, really great detail kind of spelling it out. And I know you mentioned earlier, so I want to ask you about how your solutions, and specifically, I know you guys are also leveraging satellite imagery to kind of give some additional visibility. So, yeah, sort of talk about, you know, Grow4Me's solutions and how you're addressing some of those challenges that you outlined.

Absolutely. So, that is where the solution is, where the satellite images come in. So, the satellite images is really used for two major people in the problems I just stated. So, let's start with the sponsor. So, now the sponsor is able to see where his farm is located, through the satellite images that we use to locate the farm and draw the parameters. And then he's able to see, you know, where the area is. Google Maps have very old outdated images, but with App42 through Airbus, we're able to pull up the recent satellite images. Sometimes you may have cloud cover and stuff like that, but you get to see really what's happening. In addition to satellite images, we use drones to take pictures of that area and you get to appreciate what's happening on the farm. So even though you are miles away, you get to be part of the journey of farming as a sponsor. Then also for trust, as I said, the issue— our platform is a very open platform where we list two case scenarios, the low case scenario and the high case scenario in terms of the farm's production and sale. So there are two variables that affect the farm, the how well the farm produces and how good the prices on the market. So we show you those dynamics and you can clearly tell how much you can make at the end of a cycle, hence increasing trust for the sponsor. And finally, because you are part of the whole farming process and we keep updating you through the tool, through Grow4Me, and you get to see what's happening at this stage, you get to see really what it looks like for a smaller farmer to farm, you get to get knowledge and be part of the whole farming experience. So that is for the sponsor. And finally, you get to make profit because your money goes to work for you You see that it's working and at the end of the day you get to share profit share. Sponsors get 50% of the profit and that's the solution for the sponsor. So for the farmer, he gets affordable financing instantly. We do not give them cash. We provide them plowing, seed, fertilizer, and then also we buy the harvest. So whatever needs to succeed is provided. We do not put the cash in the farmer's hand. So that means that the farmer has a ready market. He has the inputs to grow at scale, and he's already succeeding at what he's doing. Then the young farmers who are leaving the farming areas because they don't want to do the hard work of bending and using the hoe and cutlass don't have to do that because we finance plowing. So the machine, the tractor comes into the field and plows, so the farmer doesn't need to bend. Now, this may look a bit strange, but if you do go on our platform and you sign up, you would see what farmers have to do to plow their field. They have a hoe and they bend and they dig the ground. And that's what a lot of people are doing. But now with the financing we receive, we're able to plow. So it takes that stress. So what it means is that more younger people can now return back to their farming areas and farm because it's not that stressful. So these are the critical benefits of the— for the farmer. But the last benefit, which is tied to satellite images, using satellite images, we're able to do two things. One, be able to provide in-depth farm advice to the farmer because we are seeing weather patterns. We can see things like chlorophyll index, NDVI, and so on. So we can advise our farmers through our on-ground monitors or coordinators on what to do best. The second thing it does is insurance. We use satellite-based insurance services to determine the excess rain or drought. Hence, depending on how much the rain is, You can either have an insurance trigger out or you can then predict that the farm is going to be okay. So the satellite images helps us to monitor insurance and advise the farmer to put in the best practices. Finally, solution for the buyer is through our trade department. So for buyer of off-tickets of large quantities, they can be certain that they are going to get good quality graded products from us because we are both a commodity trader on the Ghana Commodity Exchange and as we expand into other African countries, we will trade on their commodity exchange. And at the same time, we also trade on the open market. And by the way, the open market in Africa is the most— the largest and most lucrative market because in the open market, it's not very, very much regulated. The elements of economics is what applies: high demand, low prices, and few commodities, high prices. So we play both in the structured commodity exchange space and in the open market space. So it gives us very good data to make, you know, sell and buy decisions. So for an offtaker who wants large quantities of soybean or maize or rice or whatever, we are able to source for them quality grains here from Ghana and provide it to them wherever they are. So these are the 3 solutions we provide to the 3 people, and this is how satellite images tie to it.

Amazing. That is really, really cool spelling it out. And I guess I had thought— I love how you described like about, you know, the sponsor being a part of the farming experience, but I had no idea how you were applying like some some of that satellite imagery for things like insurance. So that's really, really, really cool to hear about. Tell us about a little bit about your traction to date. I mean, I think you might have mentioned a little bit at the top, but how many farmers are you currently working with? How many acres?

Yeah, so we funded, we crowdfunded over $50,000 from a 3-month cycle, and we've funded close to 200 farmers. Now, let me put this in context. So the farmers typically are in farming groups. So you could have one farmer group and there could be 25 farmers. Another farmer group could be 30 farmers. And we deliberately work with farmer groups because in a farmer group there's this drive to ensure people bring the required portion that is due grow for me, which we can then trade to pay back a sponsor. So the farmer groups often ensure that all their members deliver on the promise and pay back in commodity. So we have over 200 of the farmer groups now because we are actually onboarding some more. And we've done well over 200 acres of farmland. The farmlands, by the way, range from a farmer who has 1 acre to someone who has 15 acres. So net-net, we've done over 200+ acres of farmland, particularly in maize and soya. By the end of this month, we would move into about 300, 400 acres because the maize season, we have two seasons in Ghana. The maize, last maize season is actually happening. So we'll be funding more farmers to grow more. So by the end of this month, we will move into about 400+ acres of, you know, very good farmland. And currently our total trade of commodities sits just about 3,800. But we just signed up very good contracts to do trades in the excess of $50,000 per trade for two major companies.

That's awesome. Those are really impressive metrics. And I definitely want to ask you about this. I understand your company is also, you know, fundraising right now. Tell us a little bit about the round you're putting together and how much you're seeking to raise.

Yeah, so we are currently at our seed round. We are raising $300,000 and This fund is really going to help us crowdfund over $7.9 million to fund, to basically fund farmers to cultivate more and also to trade. And net and net, with the $7.9 million that we're going to raise, we're going to make profit about $2.7 million. That's a revenue of about $10.6 million. And our funding really is going to help us drive more crowdfunding, trade, and expand our technology into other African countries that need this. I mean, that needs this crowdfunding. And just to be very specific, Ghana is where we are now. There's been a lot of, you know, people have reached out to us that we need this in Tanzania, we need this in Liberia. So we just want to add one more country so that onboarding farmers in there, we can fund them. But our focus for this particular fund esgana, 300,000, our seed round, to raise 7.9 million and to make profit about 2.7 million.

Awesome. Well, anywhere this video is showed, including if you're watching live here on Facebook and anywhere that we post it, you know, we have the website to grow for me right there so people can, you know, reach out and get in contact if they're interested in becoming a funder. You know, always like to kind of wrap up on these sort of questions, you know, what you've done. It's really impressive, you know, over these past months. You know, what advice would you offer for other early-stage entrepreneurs, or especially aspiring entrepreneurs who are just thinking about getting started now?

I'll say partnerships. That's my first advice. Partnership, because partnerships allows you to leapfrog your growth. So we have 6 strategic partnerships, okay? One with the GCX, Ghana Commodities Exchange, one with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, right directly under the crops department. What that does is that it exposes us to millions of farmers who are in the country who need financing to grow more. So without partnerships, what we need to do is actually literally go to village to village to find the farmer groups. But with a partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture, with the introductions that they give from the crop departments, we can now go into any district, talk to the district leader for the Ghana Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and then get exposed to their farmer communities in there and fund them. So partnerships is a way any tech startup or early-stage startup should go to grow quickly.

I love that advice because I think it's definitely true for, yeah, most startups for sure. I mean, some kind of strategic partnership and yeah, the ones that you've leveraged obviously have allowed you to, you know, just multiply your scale and cut out a lot of time and effort. So that's really, really cool to hear. Partnerships for sure. Final question, you know, feel free to rehash some other things we've talked about, like your expansion or your fundraising, but you know, where is growth for me headed next? Any other final news or updates to share with the Founder Institute community or any asks for the audience or anybody who's watching here today?

Yes. What next? We've been crowdfunding heavily for next year's season. So if you even want to fund a farm right now, you won't have anything for the season. It's already sold out. You can crowdfund for next year's soybean and maize. And secondly, we also raising investments for our company. So we want to really open it up out there for anyone anywhere in the world who wants to be part of this unique story, to be part of this journey. And finally, if you're in agriculture and you buy commodities across the world, or you like to really be part of, you know, something innovative like Grow4Me, we'll really be happy for you to reach out. Our social media handles are Grow4Me Africa, or myself, @nanagrow4me. You can always reach out to me and I'll be so happy to talk to you. And if you find yourself in Ghana, you know, we will be happy to visit the farm together.

Awesome. Well, Nana, this has been really, really fascinating for me. I think, you know, learning more about the, basically the entire agricultural industry and soya and maize, and as well as how you're leveraging crowdfunding. And we're really looking forward to keeping up with Grow4Me and where you're headed next. Nana Prempeh, thanks so much again for joining us.

Thank you, Dustin. It was a pleasure talking to you.