Venezuelan 'Cashea of the Countryside' Agroo Wins International Innovation Award

Agroo, a Venezuelan digital platform designed to help farmers finance the purchase of supplies and tools, has earned international acclaim as an innovative agro-food technology.

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The Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and an international jury selected the Venezuelan digital platform Agroo as one of the 15 most innovative agro-food technologies in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and an international jury selected Agroo among the 15 most innovative agro-food technologies in Latin America and the Caribbean. This recognition highlights the platform's potential to significantly impact the agricultural sector.

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Here it is a game of trust. What we are doing is rebuilding trust between the actors, and trust is rebuilt with data. And that is what we promote from our platform, that we have data to make decisions and not intuition or merely distrusting the other.

Founded by José Augusto Linárez, Agroo operates as a tech-based startup with substantial growth prospects. It currently serves 22,000 users, including 12,000 farmers, and partners with over 100 companies and 64 agricultural supply stores. A key challenge in Venezuela's agricultural market is the lack of access to credit, a problem Agroo aims to solve by rebuilding trust among stakeholders through data-driven decision-making.

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Our financing is more productive financing, not consumer financing which is well covered by the undisputed leader. So really our financing is much larger, because we are profiling the people who provide some type of service for the chain.

The platform's application allows users to provide data for profiling, granting them access to a network of affiliated stores. Financing options include up to four installments, with users accumulating points and advancing levels. The credit limit can reach $5,000, focusing on productive financing rather than consumer loans. Agroo's ecosystem optimizes production, trade, data, and financing for the agro-industrial sector. Its ambitious Crediagro tool, described as a "Cashea of the countryside," directly links agricultural producers with input stores and sector businesses, offering average transactions significantly higher than consumer-focused platforms.

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Our average ticket is much higher (than Cashea's), our user spends a minimum of $150 on average, because I repeat, it is not to buy shoes, but a tool.