Climate tech start-up Amini secures Ksh.275M pre-seed capital

Kenya-based climate tech start-up Amini has announced the closure of a Ksh.275 million ($2 million) pre-seed funding round.

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

Amini said the round was led by Swedish climate tech-focused venture capital firm Pale Blue Dot, with participation from Superorganism, RaliCap, W3i, Emurgo Kepple Ventures and a network of angel investors.

The start-up’s product is a platform that 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).

Amini’s 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, whose background is in artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science with previous stints at Intel and Nigeria-based fintech Mara, told US tech outlet TechCrunch that their platform can pull from almost 20 years of historical data and current data produced every two weeks.

Amini says it is targeting primarily corporations and multinationals in the agricultural insurance and supply chain monitoring sectors, specifically “last mile” players or those at the initial stages of the global supply chain.

“The scarcity of high-quality environmental data of Africa is a concern as it prevents others from building important climate solutions… We were blown away by [Amini’s] ambition and expertise and we believe they are best positioned to fill the environmental data gap of Africa,” Heidi Lindvall, General Partner, Pale Blue Dot, said.

Without naming names, the Kallot said they are currently in talks to sign up “some of the biggest food and beverage companies and one of the largest insurance companies globally.”