Apollo Agriculture的机器学习贷款赌注：软银4000万美元，随后首笔农业证券化

做的是什么生意

Apollo Agriculture is a Kenyan agri-fintech that sells smallholder farmers a bundle of credit, certified inputs (seed and fertiliser), crop insurance and agronomic advice, using machine learning and satellite imagery to underwrite borrowers traditional lenders ignore.

启动资金：$40M Series B (2022) plus $6M Series A (2020); over $16M in debt funding for onward lending as of 2022

起因

Founded in 2016 by Eli Pollak, Benjamin Njenga and Earl St Sauver — Pollak and St Sauver had worked at US ag-tech The Climate Corporation. Their bet: data-driven farming tools could work for smallholders outside the US, roughly doubling output and shifting farmers from subsistence to commercial production.

经过

After a $6M Series A in 2020, Apollo grew tenfold by 2022 through a network of 5,000 agents and 1,000+ retailers. In March 2022 it raised a $40M Series B led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, joined by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, CDC, Yara Growth Ventures and others, planning to double its 100,000 farmers by end-2022 and expand across East and West Africa.

结果

Apollo is still running and expanding: by January 2024 it had integrated over 350,000 farmers, added a $10M Swedfund/ImpactConnect investment for Kenya and Zambia, and in May 2026 closed Kenya's first private-sector local-currency securitisation of smallholder farm loans.

可借鉴之处

用数据证明信用价值，而不是抵押物：Apollo用机器学习和卫星承保，让银行号称不可借贷的群体变得可贷，然后用证券化证明了资产类别。