Dutch agritech startup Almacena raises €3.5M to ease the process of sourcing coffee

Amstelveen-headquartered Almacena, an agritech startup that aims to redesign enterprise coffee sourcing, announced on Wednesday that it has raised €3.5M in a Seed round of funding.

The investment was co-led by Eleven Ventures, a leading early-stage VCs in South-East Europe, and VentureFriends. The round also saw participation from existing investor Acequia Capital.

Ivaylo Simov, Founding Partner at Eleven Ventures, says, “Almacena is riding a new wave of B2B marketplaces in the food category, offering traceability, sustainability and finclusion elements as part of its business model. Eleven is excited to help the company grow in a multi-billion dollar market, laying the ground for very ambitious trading as a service platform for multiple agri products.”

“The marketplace for African agricultural products”

Founded in 2021 by Bulgarian entrepreneur Dimo Yanchev, Almacena is a platform for next-generation coffee sourcing that promotes fair trade and enables customers to buy coffee directly from the farmers, negotiate terms, sign contracts and execute the deals digitally. Its Trade Dashboard integrates finance, storage, logistics, insurance, and data collection from African producers to the European warehouse or factory.

Yanchev says, “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. The new technologies and the wider spread use of the Internet in remote rural communities allow us to redesign the supply chain.”

Currently, Almacena’s coffee marketplace has over 160 cooperatives with 300,000 farmers onboarded. AlmacenaOrigin App is used by co-ops in four African countries to map data from over 18,000 smallholder coffee farmers. The platform serves leading importers and roasters in 11 European countries.

With offices in the Netherlands, Belgium, and six East African nations, Almacena Platform links industrial buyers with origin suppliers directly. It also offers the coffee procurement teams a one-stop-shop solution to help them create and manage their own sourcing channels, digitise supply chain processes, cut team expenses, and increase pricing.

Capital utilisation

Almacena says it aims to offer a seamless coffee-sourcing experience to large-scale buyers globally in the next 12 months. The raised funds will be used to expand further in Africa, add South American origins, and expand services to American buyers. 

AlmacenaOrigin App will also 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 transparent and digitised coffee sourcing channel.

Yanchev says, “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.”