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KEY POINTS
- A growing number of agritech founders are returning for a second attempt after their first venture failed.
- Their second builds are leaner, closer to the farmer, and less dependent on grant money.
- Research shows the problem is rarely the technology. It is the mismatch between what founders build and what farmers can actually afford to adopt.
Agritech startups in Nigeria have a failure rate of approximately 90 percent within five years. The country hosts over 230 agritech startups, yet most do not survive.
That number is brutal. It is also the reason the founders in this story are worth paying attention to. They lived through it and came back.
A 2026 study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln looked at why agtech companies shut down in 2025. The researchers found that most ventures did not fail because the science was bad. They failed because of something the researchers call the Cost-Adoption Mismatch Effect. In simple terms, the technology worked. Farmers just could not afford to adopt it.
“Even companies with strong technical results struggled when the economics didn’t work,” said Ankit Chandra, one of the study’s authors.
That finding explains a pattern across the sector. Founders build for farms in North America or Europe. Then they try to sell the same product to smallholder farmers who work less than two hectares of land. The product is good. The fit is wrong.
Abdul Wahab Osman failed twice, then he got in
Abdul Wahab Osman did not fail once. He failed twice. In 2023, he entered the KIC Agritech Challenge with a startup called DigiFarms. He was eliminated at the zonal pitch. In 2024, he returned with a new startup called MilkyWay. He was eliminated at the zonal pitch again.
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Most founders would have stopped. Osman applied a third time. This time, he made it to the KIC Agritech Pro stage, the same stage he had failed to reach twice before.
His story is not just about persistence. It is about what changed between attempts. Each failure taught him something the previous version of his business did not know. Jacob Abiodun built a coconut dehusking machine as a university final-year project. The prototype failed. His savings disappeared. He almost quit.
What kept him going was a specific image. He remembered farmers in Badagry struggling with crude tools and mountains of rotting coconut husks. That image told him the problem was real. His first solution was not. He rebuilt. Coconoto is now an agritech company reshaping coconut farming in Nigeria.
The lesson is not that failure is good. The lesson is that failure told him which part of the problem was worth solving and which part of his approach was wrong.
From juice to sprouts: a $135 million failure became a $12 million run rate
Doug Evans raised $135 million for Juicero, a cold-press juicing company. It became what he calls “one of the biggest Silicon Valley failures”.
He did not blame investors or the market. “I am responsible for 100% of what happened with that company,” he said.
After Juicero shut down, Evans disappeared into the desert for three years. When he came back, he asked one question: “What can I do differently?”
Read Also: Agritech Founders Shaping Farming in Africa
His answer was The Sprouting Company. Instead of selling perishable juice with low margins, he sold a subscription model for sprouting seeds and hardware. Customers pay under a dollar per serving to grow sprouts at home. By March 2026, the company was tracking over $1 million a month, putting it on a $12 million annual run rate. The product changed. The business model changed. The founder did not.
Mayowa Adebisi spent ₦2 million and made ₦11,500
Mayowa Adebisi, founder of Farmech, describes his first attempt in plain numbers. “We spent over two million naira kickstarting operations,” he said. “At the end of the day, we made 11,500 naira. It was really tough.”
That is a return of roughly half a percent on his investment. Most people would walk away from agriculture entirely.
Adebisi did not. He says the difference between starting and succeeding is continuation. “Starting was not really a problem,” he said. “You can start anything. It’s continuation that matters.”
He also learned that technology alone does not fix agriculture. In 2023, Farmech used no technology at all. “Just cash on delivery,” he said. “The planning was poor. Sustaining the business is the problem.” That insight, that sustainability beats novelty, is what second-time founders carry into their next build.
Kumar Ranjan could not raise money for driverless cars, then he tried farming
Kumar Ranjan spent years working on autonomous vehicles. He tried to raise venture capital for a driverless car startup in India. He could not get a single cheque. “It just never really flew as a startup,” he said.
He went to work for a corporation, quit after a year, and started consulting. Then the pandemic hit. Supply chains broke. He met dairy and meat producers who were struggling. He saw an opportunity he had not seen before.
He co-founded eFeed, a precision livestock farming startup, in 2021. The company pulls data from thousands of small farmers to improve milk yields and reduce methane emissions.
Read Also; Top 10 Agritech Startups in South Africa (Founders Edition)
“The moment I got in the agriculture industry,” he said, “I could not get a single cheque for autonomous vehicles, but agriculture opened doors.” The technology he brought was not new. The problem he applied it to was.
What second-time founders do differently
The pattern across these stories is not mysterious. Second-time founders bring four things their first attempt did not have.
First, they know what does not work. Abdul Wahab Osman knew the zonal pitch stage was not the end. Jacob Abiodun knew a prototype that failed did not mean the problem was imaginary. Mayowa Adebisi knew that cash on delivery could not scale.
Second, they build for the farmer who actually exists. The Nebraska study found that adoption fails when the cost of the technology exceeds what a farmer can pay. Second-time founders price differently. They start with what a smallholder can afford, not what a venture capitalist wants to see.
Third, they stop chasing grants as a business model. Dr Belinda Clarke of Agri-TechE described the problem plainly. Corporate and supply-chain money helps founders “demonstrate revenues earlier,” which she said is “weaning them off being a grant junkie”.
Read Also: Why Agritech Startups Are Rethinking Distribution Models Across Africa
Fourth, they accept that evolution beats revolution. Farmers do not want to “down tools while they learn how to use something,” Clarke said. The technology has to fit into how a farm already works.
The funding environment is still hard
None of this means the market has become easy. Global agrifood-tech investment fell from $53 billion in 2021 to $7 billion in 2025, a drop of 87 percent. Venture capital is tighter. Investors want revenue, not projections. The companies that survive are the ones that found customers before they ran out of runway.
That is why the second-time founder story matters now. The first-time founder often builds for the pitch deck. The second-time founder builds for the buyer. Failure in agritech is common. The Nebraska study showed that half of all shutdowns in 2025 were tied directly to cost and adoption constraints, not to bad science.
The founders who come back are not ignoring that data. They are responding to it. They are building cheaper, simpler, and closer to the farm gate. They are finding paying customers before they scale.
Their first startups taught them what not to do. Their second ones are showing what works.
