News in brief: EzyAgric is among the winners of the 2023 Google Black Founders Fund, receiving a $150,000 cash award and $200,000 Google Cloud credits. The platform promotes genuine products, offers affordable pricing, country-wide delivery, credit options, and data consolidation for farmers.
EzyAgric, an agric input purchasing platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to improve farm operations, is one of the 25 winners of the 2023 Google Black Founders Fund.
This fund is for Black-founded startups in Africa. The search engine giant will give the winners $150,000 cash awards without receiving an equity in return. It also includes $200,000 in Google Cloud credits for computing services like storage, data delivery, and more.
Google will also assign mentors to help guide the founders towards reaching their goals. There are other free resources like sales training, investor prep, mental health therapy, and community offerings.
The winners are picked to represent geographical spread and diversity. For example, the 2023 list contains about 72% startups that are led or co-founded by women. Since it began, Google said that participating founders have recorded 21% employment and 7% monthly recurring revenue increase.
Nigeria had 10 companies representing it on the list while Kenya had 6. EzyAgric is one of the only two Ugandan startups on the list, with the other being Ridelink, an E-logistics platform that provides shipping and real-time tracking services.
EzyAgric boasts of promoting genuine products like fertilisers, herbicides, and seeds that experts have tested and approved. Its platform aggregates prices to offer affordable pricing and it offers country-wide delivery. There is also a moneyback guarantee for payments.
Besides these services, the company has a credit feature for farmers to get loans and a supplier feature for agro input sales. Its bulking and profiling product allows farmers combine data, inventory and insights on one platform for a subscription.
