Participated · Equity · Mar 2024

SurePay provides payment-authentication services including IBAN-name checks and a Confirmation of Payee (CoP) solution to reduce misdirected and fraudulent transfers. The company has performed over 120M CoP checks in the UK and says it has carried out 4B payment checks overall. SurePay reports checking more than 25% of all online payments in the UK and claims its technology reduces misdirected payments by 67% and fraud payments by 81%. Over 30 banks and more than 150 corporates use its service, with clients including ING, ABN AMRO, Rabobank, NatWest Group, Atom Bank and STRATO. Future plans announced alongside the raise include hiring business development teams in Germany and the UK, adding IT staff to scale the platform, launching bulk and cross-border payment solutions, and expanding SurePay PayID. The company also partners with institutions such as Triodos Bank UK and supports government payment checks related to COVID-19 schemes.

Led · Series A · Jul 2021

Agro.Club provides a digital platform that connects input suppliers and grain buyers with farmers, enabling companies to manage sales and marketing campaigns end-to-end. Its solutions are used by seed, crop protection, and animal nutrition companies as well as other suppliers. The company reports more than 19,000 farmers across Europe and North America using its services and has grown to a 70-person team. Led by CEO and founder Egor Kirin, Agro.Club has launched in North America since its seed round at the beginning of last year. The startup plans to expand across Western Europe and the Americas, with near-term launches in Spain and the UK. It also intends to introduce its fintech offering—currently available in Russia—to North American and European customers and to continue hiring and adding product features. Agro.Club operates a digital marketplace and mobile app that connects growers, crop buyers, food companies and input suppliers across three pillars: crop marketing, an ag input marketplace, and community/marketing services. The app offers roughly 20 farmer touchpoints — price monitoring with automated logistics, analytics, grain trading, input purchases, field‑level weather forecasts, expert advice and peer knowledge‑sharing. Since launching in Russia in August 2018 the platform signed over 4,000 grain companies, says 20% of farmers in the region signed up within 18 months, and the company reports millions of euros in transactions and agreements with multinationals such as Cargill, Bayer and EuroChem. The startup was self‑funded until this round and says it now has enough capital to expand into Europe and the US; it closed the round in January but delayed the announcement because of the COVID‑19 situation. Management additions — including Neil Arbuckle as regional managing director and Erin Romeo as campaign strategist — are aimed at supporting the North American expansion. The company emphasizes a blended offline/online approach to serve farmers with varying digital adoption levels.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2021

Wefarm is a London‑based social network that helps independent, small‑hold farmers meet, exchange advice, and buy or sell equipment and supplies. The service is primarily accessed via an SMS interface and has grown to 2.5 million users, with more than 37 million conversations across roughly 400 types of farming and $29 million in marketplace sales. Wefarm has found its main traction in East Africa and added about 600,000 users since its 2019 raise. The company says most users access the platform without internet and that local carrier deals make SMS rollouts slow. Wefarm is beta‑testing a digital app intended to replace SMS and accelerate expansion into more countries, with an ambition to reach far larger scale. The team is also exploring providing analytics and data products derived from its user network to surface pricing, agronomic and market insights. Wefarm operates a digital network and marketplace that connects smallholder farmers—including those without internet access—to information, trusted products and services via recommendations and SMS purchasing. The platform hosts a user-recommended Marketplace offering seeds, fertilisers and other inputs from retailers and brands. Wefarm’s network counts 1.9 million farmers and its Marketplace reached $1 million in total sales within eight months of launch, with sales growing more than 40% month on month. The company emphasizes reducing losses from fake or poor-quality agricultural inputs to help close the yield gap for smallholders. Over the next 12 months Wefarm plans to expand into farmer financing, delivery services and enabling farmers to trade their crops and commodities. The company was founded in 2015 and positions its Marketplace and network as a foundation for a broader ecosystem to support up to 100 million farmers and shift global agriculture in their favour. Wefarm operates a farmer-to-farmer digital network and social enterprise that connects small-scale farmers to ask questions and share agricultural knowledge both online and over SMS. The service uses machine learning and crowd-sourced content to surface high-quality answers and supports farmers even on feature phones. Wefarm reports a network of over 660,000 farmers, says close to one million farmers use its service, has a 90% user retention rate, and more than 30% of farmers actively contribute each month. The company is developing commercial product offerings and a “smart farming assistant” called Project Farmlog that will work on feature phones to support growers and livestock owners. Wefarm is operating in Kenya and Uganda and plans to expand into other parts of Eastern and Sub‑Saharan Africa imminently. It will use recent funding to build new features and expand product capabilities.

Led · Series B · Aug 2020

Candis provides an AI-driven software solution for SMEs to automate financial processes such as invoice receipt, data entry, invoice approval, and data export. The product is cloud-based, can be used from anywhere, and requires no onboarding. Smart integrations with accounting platforms including DATEV, Sage and Wolters Kluwer enable export of invoice data into preferred systems. The company has worked with over 4,000 customers and 200+ partners. Candis is led by CEO Christian Ritosek and is based in Berlin, Germany. The company raised $16M (bringing total funding to $30M) and plans to use the funds to launch credit cards that provide a central, real-time overview of all expenses. Candis provides a platform that automates manual bookkeeping, accounting processes and B2B payments for mid-market companies using machine learning. Its software automatically collects bookkeeping documents from various sources, classifies and authenticates data, generates approval workflows, delivers real-time insights and processes accounts payable. Thousands of companies and their tax advisors already use Candis’ technology in Germany. The company plans to use the new funding to continue development of its machine learning engine and to accelerate growth and expansion within Europe. Candis was founded in 2015 by Christopher Becker and Christian Ritosek and is based in Berlin. The company raised €12M in a Series B to support these plans. Candis provides an automated accounting solution to import, process and pay invoices. The platform enables accounting teams at startups, SMEs and enterprises to connect with accountants and tax advisors to resolve issues, collaborate with colleagues, and export data in preferred structures and file types. Plans start at €89 a month. The company was co-founded by Christopher Becker, Garik Suess and Christian Ritosek. Candis intends to use the funds to continue developing the platform and to expand operations. The company is based in Berlin, Germany.

Participated · Series B · Oct 2018

ProducePay offers a combination of supply-chain monitoring tools and financing products to help fresh produce growers and distributors manage volatility and reduce waste. The company supplies working capital for operating expenses, tech upgrades and land acquisitions, and extends post-harvest liquidity to improve growers' cash positions. ProducePay also bundles financial products with supply-chain visibility and agronomy support through “predictable commerce programs” that lock in pricing and volume before the growing season. Its platform connects growers and buyers across a network of roughly 1,000 clients and covers more than 60 commodities across 20 countries. Financial traction includes having funded more than $4.5 billion in harvests, revenue growth of 76% year over year (compared to 2022), trade volume up nearly 3x and transaction volume on track to reach $2 billion by late 2023. The company employs about 300 full-time staff and plans to expand into Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. ProducePay provides a product suite for the fresh produce industry that includes grower financing, market pricing data and analytics, and a marketplace connecting growers, distributors, and suppliers. Its financing products cover every stage of the harvest cycle with flexible payment terms, funding in two weeks or less, and no obligation to pay until produce ships. The company’s Insights and InsightsPro platforms are used by more than 10,000 growers and distributors for real-time pricing data and analytics, and its marketplace includes over 700 vetted growers and distributors. ProducePay has financed $3 billion of produce across 12 countries in North and South America. Founded in 2014 by CEO Pablo Borquez Schwarzbeck and based in Los Angeles, the company plans to use new capital to invest in technology development and infrastructure, grow its direct sales team, and expand further throughout Latin America. ProducePay offers farmers cash advances throughout the growing season and buys produce ahead of delivery, positioning itself as an intermediary between distributors, growers and grocers. The company operates a centralized marketplace that launched in October and bundles pricing and payment certainty for growers with better pricing for supplies and services such as seed, equipment and logistics. Since its 2015 launch the marketplace has seen $1.5 billion worth of produce flow across it, with $750 million of those transactions occurring in the last year. The marketplace has already seen $100 million in purchases since its October debut. ProducePay is based in Los Angeles and is led by founder and CEO Pablo Borquez Schwarzbeck. The company plans to use new financing to expand its purchasing model and marketplace to empower more farmers and distributors. ProducePay supplies fresh-produce farmers and distributors with short-term financing, online trading tools and market data to increase cash flow and transparency in the supply chain. The company created a way to securitize perishable produce as a financial asset using technology. It provides immediate access to financing for growers and distributors in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Honduras and Chile. ProducePay financed $400M of produce in 2017 (up from $17M in 2015) and has financed over $850M of produce in under four years, providing liquidity to more than 600 growers and distributors across six countries. The company has launched online trading and data-insight tools to streamline sales, discovery and real-time pricing. ProducePay was founded in 2015 and is based in Los Angeles. The Series B will be used to scale its financing business and to develop its software platform. ProducePay is a Los Angeles-based fintech that helps farmers better manage cash flow. It offers next-day advances on produce when shipments go to suppliers, provides pre-season advances, and operates its own market for distributors. The company’s product suite centers on cash-flow advances tied to produce shipments and a marketplace for distributors. ProducePay raised $77M in funding split between $7M in equity and $70M in debt. The funding was led by CoVenture with participation from Menlo Ventures, Arena Ventures, Red Bear Angels, Social Leverage, and Moonshots Capital. ProducePay is led by Pablo Borquez Schwarzbeck; the source of the debt funding was not announced.