Meet Wikifarmer, an agriculture-focused startup based mostly in Athens that has an fascinating two-sided technique. On the one hand, Wikifarmer is a supply of data with high-quality content material translated into 16 languages to assist farmers all world wide. However, Wikifarmer is a B2B market to purchase and promote agricultural merchandise.
And this can be a good transfer because the content material facet of the enterprise will doubtless drive site visitors and assist the corporate in terms of rating excessive on engines like google like Google. If farmers like what they learn, they may have a look at the opposite facet of the enterprise and begin promoting merchandise on {the marketplace}.
The corporate not too long ago raised a €5 million funding spherical ($5.4 million at at the moment’s trade charge) in a spherical led by Level 9 with a number of enterprise angels additionally taking part, similar to Nikos Moraitakis, Przemyslaw Budkowski, Cihan Aksakal and Louis Pfizner. Present traders Metavallon, Sophia Bendz and Mathias Kamprad additionally invested as soon as once more.
“I used to work for Google for nearly 11 years. One in all my finest mates from main college is an agronomist and now he’s my co-founder,” CEO and co-founder Ilias Sousis advised me. Petros Sagos is the opposite co-founder and acts because the Chief Science Officer for the corporate.
“You could have wiki websites for Recreation of Thrones, baseball gamers, for something. However nothing for farming. [Petros] began by writing plenty of content material. On the identical time, I used to be getting extra into agriculture. There’s no e-commerce web site for agriculture both. Nonetheless, agriculture is without doubt one of the industries that hasn’t been digitized with too many intermediates,” he added.
For now, Wikifarmer solely options skilled content material on its web site. However the firm finally hopes that it may begin accepting user-generated content material. After all, there are challenges with user-generated content material in terms of moderation and content material high quality. However it may additionally carry much more site visitors to the positioning. Wikifarmer is approaching 1 million distinctive guests per 30 days.
On {the marketplace} facet of issues, the corporate focuses on Mediterranean nations first, beginning with Greece, Italy, Spain and France. “We determined to transform our Mediterranean farmers into sellers,” Sousis mentioned.
Farmers on Wikifarmer largely promote fruits, greens and a few packaged items from the Mediterranean space like olive oil, honey and pastas. On the opposite finish of {the marketplace}, there are 4 varieties of patrons — meals processing firms on the lookout for uncooked merchandise to create juices or different merchandise, wholesale importers and exporters, grocery shops, and motels and restaurant chains.
On common, patrons order something between €1,000 and €20,000 in farming merchandise per order. As agriculture is without doubt one of the least digitized sectors, there’s room for a B2B buying and selling platform with out intermediaries. Wikifarmer can monitor truthful market costs, unlock new worldwide markets, facilitate funds, and assist with logistics and financing. In different phrases, Wikifarmer has a busy roadmap forward. And now it has some funding to begin engaged on it.
