Nigeria’s agricultural sector remains one of the most critical pillars of the economy, employing over a third of the labour force and contributing significantly to non-oil GDP growth.
Other News
According to National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) data reported by Nairametrics, agriculture grew by 3.79% year-on-year in Q3 2025, improving from 2.55% recorded in Q3 2024, reflecting a gradual recovery driven largely by crop production, mechanisation efforts, and rising private-sector investment.
Across 2025, broader GDP growth also strengthened to 3.98% in Q3 2025 and 4.07% in Q4 2025, with agriculture consistently ranking among the top non-oil contributors alongside trade, manufacturing, and telecoms.
Yet, structural challenges remain post-harvest losses, climate shocks, insecurity in food belts, weak storage infrastructure, and financing gaps, continue to constrain productivity.
Against this backdrop, a new generation of agribusiness founders under 40 is reshaping Nigeria’s food systems through technology, processing, logistics, export aggregation, and climate-smart farming models.
This list highlights some of the most inspiring agribusiness founders under 40, ranked from youngest to oldest, whose ventures are solving some of the most pressing inefficiencies in Nigeria’s agricultural value chain.
Aisha Raheem- Agritech founder and CEO of Farmz2U
- Age-30+ years
Aisha Raheem-Bolarinwa is a Nigerian agritech founder and CEO of Farmz2U, a data-driven platform helping farmers make informed decisions around crop planning, input usage, and market access.
With a background in Economics from Queen Mary University of London and an MBA from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Raheem-Bolarinwa brings a systems-oriented approach to agricultural transformation. Her career began in financial services and consulting, including roles in investment and client services before she shifted focus toward food systems and sustainability.
In 2018, she founded Farmz2U to address a persistent gap in agriculture: the lack of reliable data guiding planting decisions.
The platform helps farmers determine what to plant, when to plant it, and where to sell, with the goal of reducing post-harvest losses and improving yield efficiency across smallholder farming systems.
Her work gained early recognition through sustainability and innovation programmes, including participation in Techstars Sustainability Accelerator in partnership with The Nature Conservancy. Farmz2U has also been featured on global platforms such as Bloomberg and CNN, reflecting its growing relevance in data-led agriculture.
Beyond Farmz2U, she has expanded her influence into ecosystem leadership roles. She serves as Thematic Lead for Policy and Regulation within the MSME Community of Practice at the Nigerian Economic Summit Group, advising on productivity and enterprise development. She is also Co-Chair of the Oxford Africa Business Alliance and an advisor to emerging ventures in Africa’s innovation ecosystem.
Uzoma Ayogu & Ikenna Nzewi- Co founders, Releaf Earth
- Age: 30 & 31 years old
Releaf began with a simple but stark insight into Nigeria’s agricultural economy: inefficiency creates opportunity but only for the middlemen.
For co-founders Uzoma Ayogu and Ikenna Nzewi, that insight came into focus through the country’s fragmented palm oil value chain, where smallholder farmers and processors often lost value to outdated systems, manual processing, and supply bottlenecks.
Founded in 2017, Releaf was built to rewire that system from the ground up. What began as an attempt to solve agricultural inefficiencies evolved into a deep-tech industrial platform focused on improving processing capacity and unlocking value from Nigeria’s palm oil sector.
Both founders brought global academic and technical training into the mission. Ayogu, a Mechanical Engineering graduate of Duke University, and Nzewi, a Computer Science graduate of Yale University, returned to Nigeria with a shared ambition: to apply frontier technology to one of Africa’s most overlooked industries.
Their breakthrough came with Kraken, a proprietary palm nut processing system designed to dramatically improve efficiency, reduce waste, and increase throughput for small processors. It marked a shift from marketplace thinking to industrial infrastructure.
Backed by Y Combinator and global investors, Releaf has since grown into a climate-tech and agritech hybrid, targeting productivity, emissions reduction, and rural industrialisation across West Africa.
Micheal Ogundare-Founder Cash2Crop
- Age: 32 years old
Michael Ogundare is a Nigerian agritech founder and CEO of Crop2Cash, a platform focused on digitising financial access and credit systems for smallholder farmers.
A Computer Science graduate of the University of Ibadan (Class of 2017), Ogundare represents a generation of founders translating software engineering into agricultural infrastructure.
Early in his career, he focused on building mobile and payment systems designed for data collection and financial inclusion in rural markets.
His work gained early recognition in 2019, when he was named a top agricultural technology innovator at the Agrinovation Conference at just 25 years old, underscoring his role as one of Nigeria’s emerging voices in agritech.
In 2017, he founded Crop2Cash to address a persistent gap in agricultural finance: the inability of banks and formal lenders to effectively assess and serve smallholder farmers. The platform provides a structured system for vetting farmer groups using data, enabling lenders to extend credit with greater confidence while improving transparency in repayment and usage.
Crop2Cash also integrates mobile money infrastructure, allowing farmers to receive payments from off-takers and financial institutions who traditionally struggled with rural cash logistics. Beyond credit access, the platform supports inputs distribution seeds, fertiliser, mechanisation, and insurance through a digitised supply chain accessible via USSD.
Timi Oke-CEO/Co-founder AgroEknor
- Age- 35 years old
AgroEknor is a Nigerian agribusiness focused on strengthening export-driven agricultural value chains, with a strong emphasis on hibiscus production and improving farmer livelihoods across Nigeria.
Founded in 2013 by Attah Anzaku, Timi Oke, and Ayo Oke, the company was built around a shared ambition to reposition Nigerian agriculture for global competitiveness.
Drawing from early exposure to family-linked agricultural ventures, the founders set out to develop a structured agribusiness that could bridge local production with international demand while improving efficiency across the value chain.
A key part of AgroEknor’s model is its focus on exports, particularly dried hibiscus flowers supplied to markets in Asia, Europe, and North America. The company has positioned itself as both a commodity exporter and a value-chain builder, working to ensure that farmers benefit directly from increased global demand.
Co-founder and CEO Timi Oke has played a central role in shaping this export-led strategy, combining experience in banking and trade with a transition into agricultural enterprise.
In recent years, AgroEknor has expanded its financing and operational footprint. The company successfully debuted a N5 billion commercial paper issuance programme on FMDQ, arranged by United Capital Plc, to support expansion of export operations, improve supply chain efficiency, and scale its agricultural impact.
It also attracted follow-on investment from Aruwa Capital Management after an initial 2021 investment, which helped accelerate hibiscus sourcing and exports to global markets. The funding has also supported its Farmers Education and Empowerment Project (FEEP), aimed at improving farming practices and yields in Northern Nigeria while strengthening long-term supply sustainability.
Uka Eje- Co Founder Thrive Agric
- Age-36 years old
Uka Eje is a Nigerian agritech entrepreneur and co-founder/CEO of ThriveAgric, a platform designed to improve how smallholder farmers access markets, finance, and agricultural inputs across Africa.
Born in Benue State in 1990, Eje grew up within farming communities where structural inefficiencies in agriculture were part of everyday life. A defining moment came during a tomato price crash in Nigeria, when farmers sold produce for as little as N500 while the same goods were resold in cities for up to N14,000.
The disparity highlighted deep supply-chain inefficiencies and helped shape his focus on agricultural systems reform.
He co-founded ThriveAgric in 2018 with Ayodeji Arikawe to address these gaps by using technology to connect farmers directly to financing, advisory services, and structured off-take markets, reducing dependence on intermediaries and improving income stability for rural producers.
The company has since expanded operations across Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, working with hundreds of thousands of farmers and trading over a million metric tonnes of grains. It has also scaled agricultural financing, helping improve productivity through bundled access to credit, inputs, and market linkages.
Eje holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from Covenant University. He also participated in the Y Combinator Winter 2019 cohort and undertook additional studies in innovation at the University of Leeds and sustainable agriculture systems through the University of Reading.
