Meet Wikifarmer, an agriculture-focused startup based mostly in Athens that has an attention-grabbing 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. Then again, Wikifarmer is a B2B market to purchase and promote agricultural merchandise.
And this can be a sensible transfer because the content material facet of the enterprise will doubtless drive site visitors and assist the corporate with regards to rating excessive on search engines like google and yahoo like Google. If farmers like what they learn, they are going to take 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 right now’s alternate charge) in a spherical led by Level 9 with a number of enterprise angels additionally taking part, resembling 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 among my greatest associates from main faculty is an agronomist and now he’s my co-founder,” CEO and co-founder Ilias Sousis informed me. Petros Sagos is the opposite co-founder and acts because the Chief Science Officer for the corporate.
“You have got wiki websites for Recreation of Thrones, baseball gamers, for something. However nothing for farming. [Petros] began by writing numerous 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 among 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 could possibly begin accepting user-generated content material. In fact, there are challenges with user-generated content material with regards to moderation and content material high quality. However it could possibly additionally deliver much more site visitors to the location. Wikifarmer is approaching 1 million distinctive guests per thirty 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 stated.
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 forms of consumers — meals processing corporations on the lookout for uncooked merchandise to create juices or different merchandise, wholesale importers and exporters, grocery shops, and resorts and restaurant chains.
On common, consumers order something between €1,000 and €20,000 in farming merchandise per order. As agriculture is among the least digitized sectors, there’s room for a B2B buying and selling platform with out intermediaries. Wikifarmer can monitor honest 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.
