27
In August 2026, Complete Farmer became the first Ghanaian company admitted into Endeavor’s global entrepreneur network. Endeavor Nigeria, which led the selection, described Complete Farmer as a company with the potential to grow from a Ghanaian operation into a wider regional and global agricultural business.
That description captures the moment Complete Farmer finds itself as one of West Africa’s most closely watched agricultural trading platforms. Currently, it has spent the past two years signalling an intent to expand well beyond its current footprint. This is the story of how it got there, and what its cross-border ambitions look like.
How Desmond Koney Founded Complete Farmer
Desmond Koney studied mechanical engineering at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, graduating as the highest-ranking academic student. He went on to work in vertical farming and renewable energy, serving as Chief Product and Technical Officer at HerbieDome Vertical Farms before co-founding renewable energy venture Cibus Technologies in 2017, where he served as chief executive.
Koney’s father, a smallholder pineapple farmer outside Accra, died, and the farm passed to his son. Running it exposed Koney to the everyday frustrations of smallholder agriculture in Ghana, such as unreliable buyers, limited market access, and difficulty securing finance.
Complete Farmer is now one of a cluster of companies that make up Ghana’s agritech ecosystem, a group of marketplace and farm management startups that reach product-market fit locally before looking to neighbouring markets.
That growth has not gone unnoticed. Endeavor Nigeria said in a statement that Complete Farmer stood out for its potential to grow from a Ghanaian operation into a wider regional and global agricultural business.
We are excited to share with you
This FREE E-Book of 50 Agritech Pioneers & Their Game Changing Innovations.
Download the Ebook now
How Complete Farmer Started
Complete Farmer was founded in 2017 and in that same year, it won the Kosmos Innovation Challenge and received pre-seed funding of roughly $150,000 from MEST Africa, becoming a portfolio company of the Accra-based accelerator.
The company’s first model was a farm advisory and contractor-style service, and it did not stay there long. In 2018, Complete Farmer relaunched as a crowdfarming platform, letting ordinary users fund a single farming cycle remotely, track it, visit the farm in person, and share in the eventual profit. That year, the company pitched as a finalist at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield Africa in Lagos and separately won DEMO Africa.
Koney has since described this period candidly as one of trial and error. “This aspiration can be vague, as one must determine what business model works, what the product is, etc. We’ve had to make several adjustments to determine both,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.
The pivot away from crowdfarming was not a rejection of the idea so much as a distillation of what it revealed. Running a contractor service and then a crowdfunded model gave Complete Farmer a direct relationship with thousands of farmers, and, crucially, direct exposure to what large buyers actually needed. Koney has said the company realised that big fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and food-processing buyers wanted crops of a specific, consistent quality, a bar that most smallholder farmers focused on market access and yield, were not yet able to clear on their own.
Complete Farmer’s Funding History
Complete Farmer’s capital-raising pattern mirrors a broader shift already visible across where African agritech startups typically source their funding.
In September 2023, the company’s marketplace repositioning was backed by a $10.4 million pre-Series A round, split between equity and debt. The equity side was co-led by the Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund and Alitheia Capital’s uMunthu II Fund, with participation from Goodwell Investments, Proparco, Newtown Partners and the VestedWorld Rising Star Fund.
The debt came from Sahel Capital’s Social Enterprise Fund for Agriculture in Africa, Alpha Mundi Group’s Alpha Jiri Investment Fund, and Global Social Impact Investments. At the time, Complete Farmer reported working with more than 12,000 farmers across five regions of Ghana, cultivating over 30,000 acres, and exporting commodities to Asia and Europe.
Tamer El-Raghy, Managing Director of Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund`(ARAF), said at the time: “We are pleased to co-lead this investment round, having been impressed with the progress that Complete Farmer has made in facilitating access to global trade for Ghanaian farmers, as well as introducing them to new crops and sustainable farming practices. Our goal at ARAF is to invest and grow local enterprises that support smallholder farmers in building resilience to climate change.”
The investor list is itself a signal because rather than a straightforward venture round, the raise blended impact-focused equity funds with development-finance-linked debt facilities. This is a capital structure that suits a business with heavy infrastructure and working-capital needs rather than a pure software product.
Several further funding moves in 2025 extended the infrastructure build-out. In June, Complete Farmer raised $2.5 million from the European Union-backed AgriFI facility, earmarked for six new fulfilment centres intended to bring services to more than 5,000 additional farmers in Ghana’s underserved northern regions. By July, the company was reported to be mid-way through raising a $22 million Series A round, which it aimed to close by the end of that month, to fund both its next growth phase and ongoing technology investment, including an AI tool to translate its cultivation protocols into local languages as it enters new countries. In August, it secured a $5 million debt facility from Geneva-based Symbiotics Group.
Complete Farmer’s Growth Across Ghana and Togo
By August 2026, Complete Farmer’s numbers had grown considerably. According to a Technext report, More than 72,000 farmers, over 350 field agents, and eight fulfillment centres handling aggregation, grading, quality control and export logistics, now spread across two countries, Ghana and Togo. That is a marked rise from the 50,000 farmers and seven fulfillment centres reported roughly a year earlier, in mid-2025.
Recent reports also state that the company supplies international retail buyers including Aldi and Lidl. Alongside physical growth, the company has widened what it offers beyond trading itself. It has added a marketplace for farm inputs and equipment and a credit product that uses farm data to help farmers access financing.
Ghana to Togo was Complete Farmer’s first cross-border step, and it is already operational, not aspirational.
Complete Farmer’s Cross-Border Expansion Strategy Across West and East Africa
The company’s next moves fit a wider pattern already emerging among West African agribusinesses eyeing regional growth, where cross-border movement typically follows proximity and shared agronomic conditions before any leap into new regions.
According to a 2025 report, Complete Farmer had already conducted a market-visibility exercise in Côte d’Ivoire, a Francophone West African market that shares obvious logistical and agronomic overlap with Ghana. Koney has said the company plans to replicate its model in Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Senegal, framing all three as part of the same West Africa push.
“Our immediate focus is on solidifying our presence across West Africa, where we see immense potential for impact,” he has said. “We aim to tailor our solutions to the unique needs of each country’s farmers, fostering local partnerships and building robust supply chains that can serve as models for other regions.”
Beyond West Africa, Complete Farmer has also spoken of longer-term ambitions to extend into East and Central Africa, though without naming specific countries in that statement. The one East African market that has been named is Kenya, and that ambition has a longer, unfinished history than the others.
It is worth being precise about what is confirmed and what is not. Ghana and Togo are live. Côte d’Ivoire has had preparatory groundwork done but, as of the most recent available reporting, no confirmed launch. Nigeria and Senegal are named West Africa targets without confirmed launch dates.
