How Koina uplifts lives of Vietnamese farmers through its data-driven agritech platform

Farmers in Vietnam faced many supply chain-related problems, including inconsistent product quality and high cost of production and distribution.

And then, COVID-19 hit, and their hardships increased.

Thi Nguyen couldn’t just turn a blind eye to their problems.

“It was during the pandemic-induced lockdown in 2021 that we realised the inefficiencies got worse,” Nguyen tells e27. Farmers couldn’t sell their crops, and consumers couldn’t buy fresh groceries. The harvested crops were spoiled during long transportation, and farmers, who made less than US$300 monthly, became broke. “We saw the urgency to do something to create a more sustainable agriculture and wanted to uplift farmers’ lives.”

Nguyen teamed up with his former colleagues and launched Koina.

Based in Ho Chi Minh City, Koina is a data-driven farm-to-business agritech platform founded in 2021 by a group of former executives at Grab, VinID, and GiaoHangNhanh.

The startup aims to build an efficient agri-ecosystem. The goal is to grow, harvest and deliver fresh produce from farms to retailers with the highest quality at reasonable prices.

“We place farmers at the centre of the business,” says Nguyen. We build tech-enabled solutions to solve farmers’ various pain points.”

Standardising supply chain

The agri-farm tech platform helps farmers in three ways:

First, it helps farmers sell their crops. It offtakes post-harvest products from each farm and builds a distribution network to deliver fresh products to retailers.

Also Read: VinaCapital invests US$1M in farm-to-business agritech platform Koina

Second, it helps farmers buy better, cheaper farming inputs. The platform connects them with the suppliers of seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and agriculture engineers to give relevant guidance and recipe. It also buys bulk materials and distributes them to farmers at a better price, helping reduce production costs.

Third, the startup connects farmers with scientific institutes to provide them with new farming techniques and technologies to increase productivity, reduce costs, and improve product quality.

“Currently, the traditional distribution of inputs (inputs to farmers) and outputs (agricultural products to customers) is fragmented. It goes through individual traders without transparent information on the source of origin and product quality,” Nguyen shares.

“It’s also challenging for financing partners (such as banks) to support farmers, retailers and distributors with working capital and loans. We plan to introduce new services and solutions (finance, farming, food processing) shortly to add more value to the supply chain,” he goes on.

Hard to change farming habits

Most Vietnamese farmers are old and not tech-savvy; it takes hard work to change their farming habits. They also have experienced many market problems from traders/brokers. It was challenging to bring new technologies and practices to them.

The other major challenge is that farmers have no access to funds from state-owned and non-governmental institutions to support agriculture.

Besides, there are many stakeholders throughout the supply chain, and long-standing habits have been formed. The parties are small and fragmented, and the operation is complicated. “Koina is gradually standardising the supply chain one step at a time and applying technology to support business stakeholders more effectively,” he says.

Vietnam has more than 17 million farmers, 11.8 million ha of land cultivated for agriculture, and revenue from agricultural products accounts for over 10 per cent of GDP annually. However, it is a fragmented industry, which presents a massive opportunity for platforms like Koina.

Only 2,500-plus farmers have signed up with Koina, and there is an enormous opportunity to transform the supply chain.

The market is big (US$24-25 billion annually for the domestic market and US$15-16 billion for exporting). The domestic market itself is huge, and so we have no plan to expand into other markets in the next three to five years,” he shares.

Koina recently raised US$1 million as part of its seed extension round from VinaCapital. The money will be used for customer network expansion, helping to upgrade general trade selling points more effectively, thereby stabilising output to commit to farmers.

A portion of the capital will be invested in product handling, adding value for agriculture products when they reach customers to increase value.

“In the next three years, we will continue to focus on crop products, open to other products within the fruits and vegetables categories (more than US$10 billion market), and expand to other growing consuming areas in Vietnam. “After that, we may expand to other categories like seafood, which is also a big advantage of Vietnamese agriculture,” he concludes.

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