Founder and CEO Jehiel Oliver explains his company’s mission.


This tractor company is like the Uber of agriculture

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So how did you even discover that this was a problem that needed to be solved? Because you're not a farmer by training, I got a little herb garden, okay, in Nairobi right now, I got some wilted basil waiting on me. Um So I come from finance and when I left traditional banking, I started working in microfinance, always, No, I want to do work that was meaningful for me and working in microfinance, I observed that most of the global poor these banks service, but they didn't have agricultural products they don't lend in agriculture is too risky. Uh And so, you know, I thought, how can you get resources uh to these farmers, so they can actually get themselves out of poverty and and their resources is the farm is the land that they grow on. Um So that kind of directed me to working in agriculture, still in finance and that's where I observed that, you know, farmers just don't have access to tractors across emerging markets. Um in africa at least mechanized region on earth as a result of that, the farmers plant late, they under cultivate their land and they lose income um and and they're trapped in that cycle of poverty. And you break that cycle by bringing them the resources that they need to increase their productivity and increase the food security in the communities that they live in. And so that was kind of what directed us to to attack this problem. And the good thing about mechanization is that, you know, you're almost insulated from a lot of the risks in agriculture, you're not exposed to the weather, risks, plant disease. Um, you know, droughts, uh market risk, you know, price volatility of the underlying commodities being grown because because the farmers invest in mechanization upfront, right, So you can build a business around that and that's what we did. So Nigeria was your first market. Why did you pick that as the test case? Have you heard afrobeat music? Um we, we we chose Nigeria because it's a massive, it's the biggest economy in Africa. I wanted to work in Africa, very passionate about developing the continent. Um and Nigeria is the biggest market um and it's also the most populous country and quite frankly with the largest inventory of uncultivated farmland on earth. Uh Nigeria needs to develop agriculture for us to meet our caloric intake both in Africa but also globally and um and a big part of the challenge is that the farmers are confronted with is a lack of mechanization. The yield, the global yield gap when you compare what the average yields are for maze, um you know, rice wheat, the major commodities and what Nigerian farmers are producing 50% of that gap roughly is because they don't have access to tractors and that was an interesting kind of intersection of challenges, but also opportunities and that's what attracted us. So I want to go to questions in a second here, but you know, you started out selling hardware, right? In hardware, I don't know what you're talking about tractors. I don't even know what, you know, we did. We did. It was a mistake. Yeah. We learned why did you switch? What happened? It's hard to be a tractor manufacturer. It turns out, I mean, I think we, it seems obvious right there no tractors, we can make them. And so we had a contract manufacturer wasn't flex, but I did enjoy flexes presentation a couple of sessions ago. Um, but we work with the manufacturer in china and we thought we could bring low cost, low horsepower equipment into the continent with the connectivity in the marketplace attached to it. That's a lot. Well that, and my wife, she always says I'm doing too much. That's her. And, and in this case she was, she was right. And so, um, but we learned about the challenges that our partners today face, like john Deere and their dealer networks because we ourselves were trying to be a john Deere and a john Deere dealer. We identify challenges in deploying credit in these markets because we were trying to originate loans on behalf of our customers so they can buy our tractors. And I think that intelligence helped to guide our, our technology roadmap and our solution ng for our customer, it put things on our radar that we wouldn't have even considered, um, when we initially started. And so it was, it was a huge mistake and I'm very thankful that we pivoted away from that business, but we learned a lot in the process and I wouldn't change it.