Climate tech start-up Amini raises Ksh.613 million seed funding

Kenya-based climate tech start-up Amini has raised Ksh.613 million ($4 million) in a seed funding round led by Salesforce Ventures and the Female Founders Fund.

The start-up, founded by Kate Kallot in December last year, uses artificial intelligence and satellite technology to create data infrastructure in a bid to address Africa’s scarcity of climate data.

Amini said the round also saw the participation of climate tech-focused venture capital firm Satgana as well as Pale Blue Dot and Superorganism, both of whom backed the start-up’s May pre-seed round.

The venture raised $2 million in pre-seed capital at the time.

Amini’s platform aggregates data from satellites, weather data, sensors and proprietary customer data down to a square meter.

It unifies and processes the data and provides it to local and international companies via an application programming interface (API).

The platform gives farmers useful offerings such as data on the cycle between crop planting and harvesting, the amount of water and fertilizer used, as well as analytics on drought, floods, soil and crop health.

To its partner organisations, the start-up says it can help them understand the impact of natural disasters, flooding and drought across the entire continent “in a few seconds.”

Kallot told American technology outlet TechCrunch that Amini’s initial clients include agricultural and insurance companies, among them the British-American management consulting firm Aon.

The start-up says it is eyeing food and beverage companies and consumer packaged goods producers seeking to transform their supply chains to regenerative amid new rules in the U.S. and Europe that will make publicly traded companies disclose information about climate change.

Kallot, whose background is in artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science with previous stints at Intel and Nigeria-based fintech Mara, says their platform can pull from almost 20 years of historical data and current data produced every two weeks.