The lack of reliable and trustworthy data is seen as the reason why Africa’s growth is held back for decades, hampering business decisions and capital allocation as well as making it difficult to measure the impact of climate change.
This is despite the fact that the continent is home to 65 percent of the world’s uncultivated fertile land and 30 percent of mineral resources, but only accounts for only 3 percent of the global GDP.
But thanks to Amini, an early-stage company focused on solving Africa’s environmental data gap through artificial intelligence and satellite technology, which has developed a robust data aggregation and analytics platform capable of collecting, unifying, and processing satellite data, weather data, and other types of data down to a square meter.
The platform provides access to valuable environmental data analytics, including drought, flood, soil and crop health. This data can be processed to forecast crop yields for millions of smallholder farmers in mere seconds and measure the impact of natural disasters across the region.
Amini was designed to address Africa’s data scarcity, facilitate capital investment, promote climate resilience, and accelerate economic development opportunities in the region.
In its effort to expand its footprint, it has raised $2M in pre-seed funding in an oversubscribed round led by Pale Blue Dot, a leading European Climate Tech fund. Other investors include Superorganism, RaliCap, W3i, Emurgo Kepple Ventures and a network of angel investors from the global technology community.
Heidi Lindvall, General Partner, Pale Blue Dot, said: “The scarcity of high-quality environmental data of Africa is a concern as it prevents others from building important climate solutions such as for example improving farmer insurance, monitoring climate risk or supply chains. When meeting the team behind Amini we were blown away by their ambition and expertise and we believe they are best positioned to fill the environmental data gap of Africa”
The team possesses a strong track record of using deep technologies to tackle challenges specific to Africa, showcasing a unique blend of talent and expertise. Kate Kallot, the founder and CEO of Amini, boasts over a decade of leadership experience in driving global innovation in artificial intelligence and machine learning at renowned technology companies like Intel, Arm, and NVIDIA.