It’s Tuesday and today we’re taking a look at Winich Farms, a Nigerian farmer-focused startup. Founded by Riches Attai, Winner Attai, and Chichebem Jibunoh, the company recently completed a pre-Series A round led by Egypt’s DisrupTech Ventures.

You think Nigeria, you think oil. It represents 80% of the country’s exports.

But Nigeria is also one of the largest and fastest-growing nations in the world. By 2100, it will have 476 million people and be the fourth-most populous country globally.

A rapidly growing population needs farming — and a lot of it. But when that country is also among the poorest in the world, you’d expect a cascade of issues, and you’d be right.

So let’s start by answering two basic questions:

Nigeria doesn’t export much of its agricultural output. In fact, just 4% of exports are agricultural products. Some of that is likely because Nigerian agricultural goods aren’t very competitive globally — but more likely, it’s a result of domestic demand.

A huge part of the population is engaged in farming — 40 million households, to be exact. Nationally, agriculture is responsible for 48% of household income, and that figure jumps to 60.9% in rural areas.

Smallholder farmers dominate the agricultural landscape. They produce 90% of Nigeria’s agricultural output and contribute 15.5% to the country’s GDP. The sector also employs 46% of the population.

But farming isn’t exactly a gold mine.

A third of farmers are mostly growing food for their own consumption, not for sale. And over 60% of rural households run a non-farm enterprise — usually small-scale retail or basic services. In other words: farming alone doesn’t pay the bills. Agricultural workers reach just 48% of the national average productivity levels.

Why are Nigerian farmers in such a tough financial spot? You can group the reasons into three buckets:

1. Low on-farm productivity. The average Nigerian farm is tiny — just 0.85 hectares. For comparison: Ethiopia averages 1.4 ha, Ghana 2.6 ha, and Niger 4.6 ha. Fertilizer use is similarly low: only 7.3 kg/ha in Nigeria, compared to a global average of 146 kg/ha. Mechanization is nearly nonexistent. Nigeria operates at 0.027 horsepower per hectare, while the FAO recommends 1.5 hp/ha — 55 times higher. Manual labor isn’t just common; it’s the default. On nearly every metric, Nigeria trails not only global averages but also its regional peers.

2. A broken value chain. Post-harvest losses in Nigeria run between 40–50%. I’ve touched on this in my pieces on Elevarm and Eratani — but Nigeria’s situation is worse. Some of the losses come from poor storage. Others from infrastructure: 80% of roads are in bad condition. But a big part is simply how farmers sell their goods. Most rely on market days that happen every two weeks or even once a month. When you don’t have cold storage, that delay is not great. So middlemen step in. They buy from farmers and provide liquidity — but also depress their margins. And because these buyers have outsized power, they also drive up costs for processors, which then ripple down the value chain and hit consumers.

3. Under-investment and lack of financing. Agriculture gets just 4.4% of credit from banks — despite contributing 17% to Nigeria’s GDP. And only 34% of rural residents have access to any formal financial product.. Low access to credit comes down to collateral. 95% of agricultural land has no formal title. That means farmers can’t use it to secure loans, and they also can’t consolidate plots to scale up and improve productivity. Just 2% of farmers get paid into bank accounts. 97% get paid in cash1. So even if a farmer wants a loan, they can’t prove their income. And if the bank can’t evaluate a farmer’s creditworthiness, they won’t lend.

Farming in Nigeria is in a tough spot. Winich has stepped in to try and fix at least some of it.

Winich set out to streamline Nigeria’s complex value chain — to bring visibility, cut out the middlemen, and boost farmers’ earnings.

Today, it does that through three core solutions.

Winich’s main product is a platform that serves 3+1 audiences. The “3+1” bit sounds weird, but it’ll make sense in a second.

Three groups directly interact with the platform (and each other):

Then there’s the +1 — the farmers.

Farmers don’t register, don’t log in, don’t use the app. They don’t even need the internet. A feature phone is enough. Honestly, I can’t stop thinking about how clever that is. And don’t worry, we’ll get into exactly how that works in the business model section.

In 2023, in partnership with Sterling Bank, the company launched a product called Winich Card. The card allows farmers to receive digital payments instantly and also doubles as a simple savings account.

Though barely two years old, the card is already gaining traction: as of October 2024, around 25,000 cards were in circulation, with a target of 195,000 over the next few years.

To accelerate adoption, Winich plans to roll out POS terminals at agents’ locations, so farmers can withdraw cash locally. These points will make it easier to onboard new users and handle basic financial operations.

Because every sale is credited to the card, each transaction is time-stamped and tied to a unique farmer ID. That digital trail tells banks exactly how much a farmer earns and when — giving lenders the data they need to assess creditworthiness and tailor loans to real-world cash flow patterns.

As mentioned earlier, lack of capital is one of the biggest challenges for farmers — and Winich’s approach to solving it has gone through a few stages.

Initially, Winich was positioned as a crowdfunding platform. It provided seeds and training to farmers, and relied on individual “Sponsors” — creditors who would invest in a farm and receive a share of the profits. That model still exists if you look at the company’s Terms and Conditions, but it’s clearly hard to scale.

Winich Card helped improve the credit offering. Now that farmer payments could be traced, the company finally had data: how much a farmer was earning, and when.

That opened the door for a new model. By partnering with SeedFi, Winich now lets farmers use their stored crops as collateral — no formal financial records or other assets needed.

They’re also piloting financial services for off-takers: a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) product that allows processors to pay in installments. But with interest rates hitting 35% annually, adoption has been limited.

There’s a lot to get into, so let’s not our waste time and, well, get into it.

Here’s how value is created across the chain.

First, agents find farmers. For this whole thing to work, the platform needs supply — and that means farmers. Agents are the ones who find them, onboard them, and create a small local database with details. Each agent ends up managing a small cluster of nearby farmers.

Second, when farmers harvest and are ready to sell, they message agents. This is the craziest part. If a farmer wants to sell their produce, they type a USSD code (similar to the way you check your balance on your phone) to find the nearest agent, who’s usually located within a 300 m radius. Through that USSD code, farmers can also request a callback from Winich if they can’t find an agent and learn the price of their product in real time.

Third, the farmer brings their produce to the agent. At the collection point, the agent checks product quality. If all looks good, they log the transaction — including the farmer’s unique ID — into the app.

Fourth, an order comes in. When an off-taker places an order, agents bid for it. This allows Winich to match supply with demand dynamically.

Fifth, a driver gets dispatched. A driver is assigned to collect the produce from the winning agent and deliver it to the off-taker — whether that’s a processor, distributor, or retailer.

Now, let’s talk about who gets what out of this.

The four participant types — farmers, agents, drivers, off-takers — each get different forms of value.

For agents and drivers, this is straightforward: it’s a way to earn income. Winich isn’t solving a deep pain point for them — it’s giving them a role (and a payday) in the broader system. Think of them as infrastructure: essential, but transactional.

The real value creation — and Winich’s reason for existing — is focused on farmers and off-takers:

What makes Winich hard to build is exactly what makes it defensible.

A four-sided marketplace is a lot of pain to get off the ground. But once the flywheel starts spinning, you get more ways to reinforce it — more ways to throw fuel on the fire.

There are several levers to bring in more farmers: deploy more agents, offer better loan products, expand demand, and so on. On the flip side, there are multiple ways to increase demand too: onboard more farmers, widen the crop variety, improve logistics, etc.

And the best part is that by pulling one lever can trigger multiple downstream effects. Take credit, for example. If Winich improves its lending product and more farmers take out loans, both sides win: farmers improve their cash flow, and Winich earns from interest. That cash gets reinvested. Winich can deploy more agents. Farmers can improve product quality and reduce post-harvest losses. Better quality brings in more off-takers. More agents bring in more farmers. More farmers attract more off-takers. And so on.

As the product matures and expands, Winich will unlock even more levers — and those levers will start reinforcing one another. More mini-loops, more compounding effects, more defensibility.

This is the one part of the business that’s actually pretty straightforward.

On every order, Winich earns 5–10% of the off-taker’s payment. Both the driver and the agent also get a cut. Agent commissions are based on GMV and range from 0.3% to 5%, depending on seasonality. There’s also a 0.3–1% triannual incentive if an agent aggregates over 1,000 tonnes of produce in a single quarter.

That covers the transactional side.

As for financing — the company doesn’t disclose how much it earns. That said, one source notes that farmers receive the $1.62 Winich Card for free, with the expectation that Winich will recoup that cost through usage-based fees.

Broadly, you can divide all risks into two buckets: strategic and operational.

Strategic risks are things like picking the wrong market. But in Winich’s case, that seems unlikely. In a nascent market like Nigeria’s agriculture sector, you’re not solving a niche problem — you’re tackling a massive, structural one that affects millions. And Winich seems to have made smart strategic choices: it picked a business model that minimizes barriers to entry, and it’s addressing secondary issues (like finance) that will help power the flywheel in the long run.

So, yeah — the real risks are operational. And it’s not like it’s a hot take.

Riches acknowledges the major infrastructure challenges: the road network is bad, the unbanked population is still huge.

Maintaining thousands of semi-independent agents, while enforcing consistent produce grading, payment rules, and data accuracy, etc. — it’s all operationally gruelling. Moreover, in a country with low trust any mistakes, any cracks can threaten the business.

Continuing to onboard new agents, new farmers is a lot of work. The more participants the company onboards, the more strain there is on the infrastructure it’s building. If there’s a climate calamity and the harvest drops by 50%, revenue falls significantly, but the assets remain on the balance sheet as they were. It’s not Amazon, where natural causes have no effect on paper towels.

So scaling is hard—and will continue to be hard.

To me, the bull case has three big pillars.

First: the marketplace. Winich is building a four-sided marketplace — and that’s an extremely rare thing. Two-sided marketplaces are already tough to disrupt once they reach scale. A four-sided one is even more resilient — if they can pull it off. The challenge is getting to critical mass.

Second: expanding the product. As the flywheel spins, Winich can layer on new offerings — whether directly or through partners: inputs, insurance, advisory services, etc. Higher-margin revenue streams that piggyback on the existing customer base. Each new product increases stickiness and defensibility.

Third: expanding geographically. The company has already expanded to Tanzania — which likely faces similar structural challenges. With scale, regional expansion gets easier. There’s a big opportunity to replicate this model across Africa and potentially beyond.

There are so many fascinating nuggets in this business — the feature phone interface, the agent network, launching their own debit card and so on.

This is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting businesses I’ve ever seen.

1: This data is from 2018, but it’s unlikely that something has significantly shifted since then.