aQysta Logo (Copyright: aQysta)
10
Sep
current, Projects

aQysta

Posted on by Katharina Heilmaier
Growth Capital for aQysta

Small Farmers. Big Impact.
Unlocking the economic potential of smallholder farmers with a proprietary software platform.

Societal Challenge

Fewer than 0.2% of the world’s 500 million smallholder farmers are certified organic, even though most already farm organically by default. Meanwhile, European importers face a €49bn+ organic food market growing at roughly 8 to 10% a year, with certified supply falling further behind each season.

Solution

aQysta closes this gap with a proprietary software platform that digitizes registration, certification and processing: every farm and plot is digitally mapped, and products are tracked along the entire supply chain, from harvest to buyer. That meaningfully lowers certification cost per farm and is the technology layer that lets aQysta onboard new farmer groups quickly, rather than staying stuck at today’s roughly 0.2% certification rate among smallholders. At origin, aQysta runs its own renewable-energy-powered processing facilities for preparation and final quality control. A locally embedded team in Nepal, Malawi and India works directly with farmer groups, while a Europe-based team aligns with them on the quality and certification requirements that apply there. Together, this builds unbroken traceability from certification through to sales to European buyers, and lets aQysta bring certified supply up to meet existing demand step by step.
aQysta Team (Copyright: aQysta)

The team behind aQysta

The founding team around CEO Pratap Thapa and COO Lennart Budelmann combines twelve years of experience building markets for smallholder farmers with ten years of experience building reliable European agricultural supply chains, previously at Airbus. Both hold an MSc from TU Delft. Pratap grew up in a smallholder farming family in Nepal himself, and his goal is to give smallholders like the ones in his own family access to exactly the markets that have so far been closed to them.

Interested? Get in touch with Tom Josczok to learn more about the investment opportunity.