61. WeFarm

Founder: Kenny Ewan
Founded: January 2015 (launched February 2015)
Website: www.wefarm.org

During his time working with indigenous agricultural communities in South America, Kenny Ewan witnessed first hand the ingenious solutions local farmers had found for their problems. He also discovered that with no means of communication, these solutions rarely travelled as far as the nearby villages.

With an estimated 500 million small-scale farmers around the world without access to the internet, Ewan saw that a virtual library of techniques and information could be an invaluable resource. He launched Startups 100 2015-listed WeFarm, a service that allows them to do just that, via SMS. Free for users, the service works on a business-to-business basis, deriving revenue from its two products: WeFarm insight and WeFarm Reach. Insight is a data, insight and sustainability tool that provides information to businesses and NGOs, while Reach connects knowledge requests to sales through targeted advertising, or can be used as a platform to reach the remote parts of the supply chain.

With 51,000 farmers already signed up to the service, the business hopes to have one million farmers using the service by the end of the year, with plans to launch in Brazil and India and the development of a smarter, faster WeFarm in the pipeline.