Aiming to digitize the agricultural supply chain, making it more sustainable and efficient, Dutch startup Almacena has just raised €3.5 million. The startup will now develop its digital coffee marketplace, targeting the African market.
Coffee is a universally enjoyed drink that has a significant place in cultures and communities right across the world. Current coffee distribution relies on a network of aggregators and traders to source coffee due to structural barriers like lack of know-how, information and finance. The result is an inefficient value distribution, and lack of transparency and consistency.
Aiming to change this through digitalising the industry is Almacena – an Amsterdam-based startup that has plans to transform the coffee supply chain paradigm.
Co-founder and CEO Dimo Yanchev: “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.”
New funding
Today, Almacena has announced the raise of a €3.5 million seed round. The capital raise was led by Eleven Ventures, one of the leading early-stage VCs in South-East Europe, who previously invested in high-growth companies like Payhawk, Gtmhub, and Dronamics.
European early-stage VC VentureFriends and US-based Acequia Capital also participated.
Ivaylo Simov, Founding Partner at Eleven Ventures: “Dimo and his team are taking into the next age a legacy trading business. Almacena is riding a new wave of b2b marketplaces in the food category, offering traceability, sustainability and inclusion elements as part of its business model. Eleven is excited to help the company grow exponentially in a multi-billion dollar market, laying the ground for a very ambitious trading as a service platform for multiple agri products.”
Redesigning coffee sourcing
Founded by Dimo Yanchev and Karl Robijns, Almacena is a tech-enabled B2B marketplace for agricultural products that offers a one-stop solution to sellers and buyers. Since 2018, the platform has been at the forefront of digitizing agricultural supply chains.
The platform enables buyers to procure coffee directly from the producers, negotiate terms, sign contracts and execute the deals digitally. Its proprietary Trade Dashboard integrates finance, storage, logistics, insurance and data collection from the African producer to the European warehouse or factory.
This helps all actors overcome current challenges in the coffee supply chain – including inefficient value distribution, lack of transparency and consistency.
Dimo Yanchev: “The new technologies and the wider spread use of the Internet in remote rural communities allow us to redesign the supply chain. 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. This round will help us to prove on a global basis that disintermediation in agriculture supply chains works.”
Almacena Platform connects industrial buyers directly to origin suppliers from its offices in The Netherlands, Belgium and six East African countries. It delivers a one-stop solution to the coffee procurement teams that allows them to build and manage their own sourcing channels, digitalise the supply chain operations, reduce team costs, and gain on price.
The coffee marketplace was launched in 2021 and now has over 160 cooperatives with 300,000 farmers onboarded. The AlmacenaOrigin App is used by co-ops in four African countries mapping data from over 18,000 smallholder coffee farmers. The platform serves leading importers and roasters in 11 European countries.
Now, this funding will help scale up operations, with plans to offer seamless coffee sourcing to large-scale buyers internationally. It’ll help the firm expand further in Africa, add South American origins, and expand services to American buyers. The AlmacenaOrigin App will be expanded with more data insight tools and predictive models, and the company will launch an Inventory management app to complement the TradeDashboard, thus creating a fully transparent and digitized coffee sourcing channel.
George Dimopoulos, Partner at VentureFriends: “Almacena is adding clear value to both suppliers and buyers of green coffee, facilitating the transaction by improving efficiency, adding transparency and digitizing the entire process. We are happy to join the journey and support the Almacena team in their mission to disrupt this space.”
