@alfredoeinsteino20243Hi, I’m Toluwanimi, building HarvestIQ: AI for smallholder farmers on basic phones 🌾
I’m Toluwanimi (Alfred), a Mechatronics Engineering student at FUT Minna, Nigeria 🇳🇬
What I’m building: HarvestIQ, with one mission: give smallholder farmers access to AI without needing a smartphone. Through a basic phone and USSD, farmers get commodity prices, AI crop-storage advice, and farmer-to-buyer matching. No internet and no app. It’s 100% AWS serverless.
Also built: RescueHacks, an offline emergency response system, for the Global Innovation Build Challenge V2. Both projects come from the same belief: useful tech has to work where connectivity and smartphones can’t be assumed.
Stage: Working prototype, including a live crowdsourced price tracker for Minna markets (harvestiquser.ai.studio). I’m preparing for pre-seed funding to take it public.
What’s working: Serverless keeps costs low, and USSD reaches farmers where apps can’t.
What I need: Introductions to pre-seed investors who back agritech or emerging markets, and to anyone who has scaled USSD or SMS products in Africa.
I’m also into embedded systems and IoT, so I’d love to meet anyone building at the hardware and AI edge.
Comments2
When a Minna farmer uses HarvestIQ, who pays for it: the farmer per USSD session, the buyer you match them with, or a cooperative?
Good question, Ryan. Farmers pay a small monthly fee (about ₦500), and buyers pay for a higher tier (about ₦10,000) with fuller listings and price data. The farmer side is priced low on purpose, since the value to them is the price and storage information. The buyer side is where I expect the margin, because buyers already spend money and time searching for produce. I’m validating this in Minna markets first, starting with the price tracker. Happy to share the numbers behind it if useful.
2 comments
When a Minna farmer uses HarvestIQ, who pays for it: the farmer per USSD session, the buyer you match them with, or a cooperative?
Good question, Ryan. Farmers pay a small monthly fee (about ₦500), and buyers pay for a higher tier (about ₦10,000) with fuller listings and price data. The farmer side is priced low on purpose, since the value to them is the price and storage information. The buyer side is where I expect the margin, because buyers already spend money and time searching for produce. I’m validating this in Minna markets first, starting with the price tracker. Happy to share the numbers behind it if useful.