Meet WikiFarmer, an Athens-based startup focused on agriculture and an exciting two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, WikiFarmer is a source of knowledge with high-quality content translated into 16 languages to help farmers around the world. On the other hand, WikiFarmer is a B2B marketplace for buying and selling agricultural products.
And this is a smart move as the content side of the business drives traffic and helps the company to rank higher in search engines like Google. If the farmers like what they read, they will look at the other side of the business and start selling products on the market.
The company recently raised 5 million euros in funding ($5.4 million at today’s exchange rate), led by Point Nine, with several business angels also participating, including Nikos Moratakis, Przemslaw Budkowski, Sihan Akkal and Louis Pfizner. Existing investors Metavalon, Sofia Bendz and Matthias Kamprad reinvested.
“I worked for Google for 11 years. One of my freshman friends is an agriculturist and now he’s my co-founder,” CEO and founder Elias Susis told me. Petros Sagos is the co-founder and serves as the company’s Chief Scientific Officer.
“You’ve got wikis for Game of Thrones, baseball players, whatever. But there is nothing to farm. [Petros] It started with writing a lot of content. At the same time I was going into agriculture. There is no e-commerce site for agriculture. Still, agriculture is one of the most decentralized non-digital industries.
For now, WikiFarmer only features professional content on its website. But the company hopes it can eventually start accepting user-generated content. Of course, there are challenges with user-generated content when it comes to moderation and content quality. But it can bring more traffic to the site. WikiFarmer is approaching 1 million unique visitors per month.
In the market place, the company will first focus on the Mediterranean countries, starting with Greece, Italy, Spain and France. “We decided to turn our Mediterranean farmers into sellers,” Susis said.
WikiFarmer farmers sell fruits, vegetables, and some canned goods, mostly from the Mediterranean region, such as olive oil, honey, and pasta. At the other end of the market, there are four types of buyers – food processing companies looking for raw products to produce juice or other products, wholesale importers and exporters, grocery stores and hotel and restaurant chains.
On average, buyers order anything between €1,000 and €20,000 worth of agricultural products per order. As agriculture is one of the least digitized sectors, there is room for a B2B trading platform where there are no intermediaries. WikiFarmer can track fair market prices, open new international markets, facilitate payments, and assist with logistics and financing. In other words, WikiFarmer has a busy roadmap ahead. And now he has some funding to start working on it.
