Winich Farms Is Quietly Building the Financial Infrastructure Nigeria’s Agriculture Desperately Needs
Nigerian agri-tech startup Winich Farms is doing something most players in the space have not managed it is building financial infrastructure for agricultural value chains rather than treating trade and finance as separate problems.
Founded in 2020, Winich Farms set out to fix a structural gap that has long held back Nigeria’s agricultural sector: farmers with no access to structured markets or credit, and buyers dealing with unpredictable supply and tight working capital. Most solutions in the market have picked one side of that equation. Winich Farms picked both.
“Most existing solutions address these challenges in isolation either as marketplaces or as lenders,” co-founder and CEO Riches Attai told Disrupt Africa. “Our differentiation lies in embedding finance directly into trade, allowing us to generate proprietary transaction data, finance real economic activity, and build a more scalable and defensible model.”
The platform connects nearly 200,000 smallholder farmers directly with processors and retailers, and layers financial products on top of those transactions. Farmers can access produce-collateralised credit, while buyers benefit from inventory financing in a buy-now-pay-later model tied to commodity flows. By anchoring credit to verified trade activity, Winich Farms says it can underwrite risk more effectively a model that has historically been very difficult to crack in African agriculture.
The numbers suggest the approach is gaining real traction. The startup has recorded over $50 million in gross merchandise value and total payment volume, growing at double-digit rates month-on-month. Attai credits the momentum to a growing network effect and deeper adoption of its embedded finance products, rather than just aggressive market entry.
Winich Farm financial Infrastructure
This is the Winich Farms financial infrastructure play in full view using transaction data generated within its own marketplace to power smarter lending, and using that lending to pull more activity back through the marketplace.
Disrupt Africa reported last June that Winich Farms had closed a pre-Series A round to strengthen operations and explore expansion across Africa. For now, Nigeria remains the core market, where the company has built supply networks and distribution infrastructure across key agricultural regions. Egypt has been flagged as a potential next destination, given its similar dynamics in agricultural trade and financial inclusion.
Revenue comes from margins on commodity trade as well as fees and interest from the embedded finance layer. Attai says the financial services side is becoming a growing share of overall revenue, improving the unit economics of the business as it scales.
In a sector where both agri-marketplaces and agri-lenders have struggled to achieve lasting scale in isolation, Winich Farms is betting that combining the two into a single integrated system is what finally makes the math work for African farmers and the businesses that depend on them.
