Antugrow Is Putting Farm Credit On-Chain, and 500 Global Accelerator Took Notice

TL;DR,

• Antugrow secured a spot in 500 Global’s accelerator, a major step to refine its strategy, attract investors, and expand its innovative agricultural finance model beyond East Africa.
• The company standardizes co-op records, issues anonymized NEAR-based IDs, and matches farmers to DeFi liquidity via Base and UTU—cutting risk, fees, and time-to-credit.
• With Base grants, a NEAR Horizon cohort win, and TIMBUKTOO alignment, Antugrow is gearing up to scale across Africa with satellite-powered insights.

Nairobi-based agritech startup joined the 500 Global’s 5-day Pre-Acceleration Academy running October 6-10 in Nairobi. In blockchain, most opt for fintech; however, Antugrow took it a step further, focusing more on agriculture.

Here’s a look at what the program entails and why Antugrow makes the cut.

Agritech Startup Building Trust with On-Chain Data and Credit Scores

The Pre-acceleration program intends to aid Antugrow sharpen its business strategy, attract investors and prepare to scale its model beyond East Africa. The program is part of UNDP’s TIMBUKTOO program, an African-centred initiative that targets supporting 10,00 startups, scaling 1,000 ventures, impacting 100 million people while creating 10 million jobs.

The 500 Global accelerator provides professional mentorships and network opportunities, startup resources, and takes a mere fledgling startup into the next step. The program’s assets under management are over $2.7 billion, and it has invested in over 100 portfolio companies in Africa since 2011. Others to benefit from the firms are Chipper Cash, Smile Identity and Sweep South.

In a nutshell, the agritech startup will refine a go-to-market strategy, acquire prominent capital partnerships, and reinforce its unique services to Kenya’s agricultural community.

Founded in 2023, Antugrow caught the eye of many investors in just under two years. The company focuses on providing various agritech services addressing persistent challenges to small-scale farmers. The organization offers valuable financial history to farmers, a sector that traditional institutions have severely failed at.

The company standardizes cooperative harvest data, links it to anonymized farmer identities, and builds reputation scores that lenders can trust. This reduces risk, lowers fees and speeds up access to working capital. Iyts an affordable, scalable on-chain credit system focusing on recording a farmer’s proof of performance.

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Alongside the 500 Global accelerator program, the platform announced its new mission of helping more than 1000 farmers document sales and build trust with lenders. It’s typically formalized to record these records, enabling transparent transaction histories, thus stronger credit profiles.

Think of it more like verifiable digital form records, which provide a prerequisite for equitable financing. For the agritech startup, it focuses on putting reliable data at the end and by doing so, cooperatives can adapt quickly, interconnecting farmers. On-chain credit systems reflect real productivity, collateral availability and bridge the gap between finance and farmers.

A Multi-Chain Technical Blueprint for Scalability

As a blockchain agritech company, Antugrow understands that a multi-chain architecture provides better use cases and broader services. The company operates across three distinct blockchain networks: EAR Protocol for verified farmer identity management, BASE Network for daily transaction recording, and UTU Trust for credit scoring and liquidity pool matching.

Its technical operations typically have the following breakdown:

• Identity and verification
  • Farmers undergo KYC using Vibranium ID.
  • Verified farmers receive anonymized V‑IDs backed on NEAR.
• Transaction capture and publication
  • Cooperatives submit daily collection records referenced to V‑IDs.
  • Daily farmer transactions are batched and published on Base.
• Reputation and liquidity matching
  • Verified profiles, enriched with Base data, are listed to UTU’s liquidity pool.
  • The system issues UTU Trust Tokens as proof of participation per farmer.
  • Anonymized on‑chain wallets are matched to a DeFi liquidity pool based on credit status and capital requirements.
• Smart contracts and cost efficiency
  • Antugrow’s smart contracts facilitate deposits of crypto, reconcile multiple record‑keeping transactions at low fees, and enable low‑cost liquidity transfers when lending to farmers.

Its unique flow creates verifiable, anonymized historical harvest data while building reputation scores from streaming data. Lenders can evaluate creditworthiness with far greater confidence, and farmers can access their financing.

The agritech startups have a core product, the Shambani platforms, a blockchain-powered system that provides funding and access based on the collected data. Through this, the company operates on a software-as-a-service model for farmer organizations using satellite data for crop mapping. Additionally, it offers farm advisory services such as crop risk analysis and rapid crop sustainability insights.

Typically, the core goal for Shambani is to unlock farm health insights and “boost yields up to 5x through data‑driven farming.”

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Strategic Traction: Grants, Wins, and Key Alliances

Antugrow has showcased significant growth partnering with the likes of Project Mocha to expand access to credit and work capital by leveraging on-chain harvest records and tokenized coffee trees. This partnership further meshed real-world agriculture with blockchain while attracting investors and sustainability-minded partnerships. This typically extends the notion of tokenized agricultural assets where farm outputs and trees can be represented in programmable finance.

Institutional support continues to build: Antugrow received Base Builder Grants in December 2023 as an African agriculture blockchain project. Later on, it ranked first in the NEAR Horizon Accelerator Cohort 2 in March 2024, achieving mainnet on NEAR and onboarding users and partners within the 8‑week program. Recently, in February 2025, the team engaged the Kenya Space Agency to explore deeper satellite data applications in agriculture.

As a committed Agritech startup, Antugrow’s next phase centers on executing at scale and deepening partnerships, standardizing data across more cooperatives, and extending its reach beyond East Africa in line with Timbuktoo’s continent‑wide goals.