The Dutch agritech startup aims to use the investment to improve its digital coffee sourcing marketplace platform and expand its operations to large-scale buyers globally
Almacena is keen to expand operations to Latin America to target the world’s largest coffee producers | Photo credit: Heidi Erickson
Amsterdam-based Almacena Platform has secured €3.5m ($3.4m) investment to enhance its operations in agricultural supply chain management platform.
Launched in 2018 with the aim to increase transparency within coffee sourcing, Almacena seeks to standardise the agricultural commodity supply chain and make trading as transaparent, profitable and sustainable as possible.
The company’s online coffee sourcing marketplace allows buyers to procure coffee directly from producers and sign contracts digitally. Additionally, its proprietary Trade Dashboard integrates finance, storage, logistics, insurance and data collection from the African producer to the European warehouse or factory.
Almacena's online African supplier catalogue currently represents 12% of total African coffee export capacity.
However, with Africa contributing approximately 10-15% of the total coffee supply, Almacena is keen to expand operations to Latin America to target the world’s largest coffee producers in countries like Brazil and Columbia.
The company will use the new funding to initially scale its African operations before targeting South American origins and expanding services to American buyers.
“Almacena’s mission is to create sustainable and transparent agriculture supply chains. The way agri commodities, like coffee, reach the end market has not changed for hundreds of years and resulted in economic and social inefficiencies that we are ready to solve. We believe that in the future commodity trading will be disbanded to allow for service competition, direct procurement and value redistribution. Almacena aims to lead that change, starting with coffee,” said Dimo Yanchev, CEO, Almacena.
The investment round was co-led by Eleven Ventures, VentureFriends and Acequia Capital.