Ghanaian agritech startup Agrocenta wins $500,000 Seedstars prize

Ghanaian Agritech Startup Agrocenta Wins $500,000 Investment in Seedstars World Competition
Agrocenta, a Ghanaian agritech startup has won a $500,000 investment for coming first globally at the just concluded 2018 Seedstars Global competition in Lausanne, Switerland.
The final leg of Seedstars World early-stage pitching competition took place on Thursday with 21 African startups among the 65 finalists competing in Switzerland.
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At the live final pitching showdown, 12 shortlisted startups went head-to-head, with Agrocenta eventually being crowned the overall global winner of the contest, taking home a $500,000 investment from Seedstars World.
Agrocenta is an online platform that connects the smallholder farmer in the staple food (rice, maize, millet and soybean) value chain to a wider online market to trade, access truck delivery services at the click of a button and also get real-time market information delivered to their mobile phones via SMS and voice services.
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Startups from African countries carted away other prizes. SolarFreeze, a Kenyan startup that has developed solar-powered cold storage units for smallholder farmers and traders in Sub-Saharan Africa, took home $50,000 from the ENEL Group, while the Merck healthcare prize went to South African medical content aggregation service EMGuidance which won $50,000 in funding and gained admission to Merck’s e-health accelerator.
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Edves of Nigeria, which has developed a portal for schools to share education materials with learners and for parents to make payments to schools, was the recipient of the Transforming education prize.
Founded in 2013 by Swiss national Alisée de Tonnac, Seedstars World is the global startup competition aiming at impacting people’s lives in emerging markets.