After running biotechnology company iMed Tech from 2015 to 2018, South African innovator and serial entrepreneur, Nneile Nkholise has shifted her focus to agriculture. At Thola, she is building a tech-driven livestock inventory and marketplace to improve the global cattle supply chain.

In 1961, 376.4 million pigs were slaughtered around the world to produce pork. In the five decades that followed, that amount more than tripled and by 2018, 1.48 billion pigs were killed to meet the increasing demand for pork. This trajectory was similar across the board — chickens, turkeys, sheep, goats, even cattle whose demand did not see as significant an increase as pigs. In 1961, 173 million cattle were slaughtered for meat around the world; by 2018, that number had nearly doubled to 302.15 million cattle.

Nkholise’s mother started rearing pigs when she was 10 years old. She recalls her mum’s efforts, trying to sell to Asian factory workers in Lesotho, because there was high demand for it there. With the pandemic in full swing in 2020, Nkholise was back home to spend some time with her mother. In the weeks that followed, she quickly came to the realisation that the challenges her mother faced in the early days of the pig farm had not changed nor had they metamorphosed into new ones. This was disappointing. Around the world and on the continent, technology was rapidly transporting different sectors, from finance to retail to healthcare, into new dimensions. To her dismay, agriculture seemed to have missed this spacecraft. 

“My mother was like, you know what, you have all the solutions, do something,” Nkholise, a fifth generation farmer tells AMAKA Studio. 

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So she launched Thola, formerly known as 3DIMO, an agritech company she hopes will become a significant player in the cattle production global supply chain in years to come. 

For buyers, Thola provides a transparent purchasing process where they can access information about the livestock they intend to buy, the vaccinations it has received, food it has been fed. And receive standard prices that removes the stress of haggling or buying livestock at prices way above its market value. 

While it is not the only home-grown agritech company looking to digitise livestock auctions; Thola is utilising a novel muzzle identification technology to track the welfare of each animal and provide transparency to buyers and sellers. It also labels livestock to their rightful owners. 

“In South Africa, we are facing a problem of stock theft,” says Nkholise. “When we started building a marketplace, we wanted to make sure that the stock that’s sold on the marketplace truly belongs to the farmers.” 

Although the company started running case studies in South Africa, its debut market has been the United States. Nkholise reveals they have received a lot of support from farmers and corporates seeking more seamless supply chain solutions within the livestock sector. In the first year of operations, Nkholise says they worked with 541 farmers with a total herd size of 211,000 cattle. 

First-time founder blues

Prior to her foray into agriculture, Nkholise ran iMed Tech, a biotechnology company she founded in 2015 that specialised in additive manufacturing in the healthcare sector. While in operation, iMed Tech manufactured breast prosthetics for cancer survivors across South Africa among a few other products. Unfortunately, a gamut of regulatory requirements in the ensuing three years proved to be fatal. Nkholise says most of her time was spent engaging with regulatory bodies in the medical and healthcare sector often to the detriment of her duties as CEO and founder.

“In the eyes of the public it [iMed Tech] was successful,” Nkholise says. “[But] I felt like we continuously failed to meet the milestones that we had set for ourselves although we were clearly achieving something.”

For new founders and innovators, Nkholise says the regulatory environment in South Africa can be daunting. Not only are there new regulatory demands and requirements to meet every now and then, there is little to no support from the relevant bodies to make meeting the requirements clear and stress-free. 

As a solo founder, these challenges took its toll. Anxious and depressed, Nkholise says she turned to her only pillar of support, her mother. 

“It really hit my health quite a lot because I was in a lonely place,” she explains.

With Thola, Nkholise is doing things differently. She has two co-founders, a software engineer who writes all the code and a data scientist who crunches all the numbers. Having partners to share the burden of a teething business has made her second foray into the startup world easier to handle. She also says she has surrounded herself with other founders familiar with the tediousness of starting a business. And she has mentors and friends to whom she stays connected and open about her challenges and the emotional strain of running a business. In addition to these, Nkholise says she is now giving herself permission to take breaks where necessary and to compartmentalise her business and personal life. “It’s something I never did while running iMed Tech. I was focused 24/7 on iMed Tech.”

Fundraising in a pandemic year

The pandemic year was unprecedented, funding wise, for the agritech sector on the continent. According to a report from Baobab Insights, agritech startups raised $122.392 million USD in 31 funding rounds in 2020, compared to $79.703 million USD in 2019. Thola was one of the agritech companies included in this report. It closed two funding rounds in 2020. 

Thola is a portfolio company in United Arab Emirates based Sharjah Startup Studio which offers a $30,000 USD equity free pre-seed cheque. It is also a portfolio company in The Baobab Network which offers a $25,000 USD early-stage capital. 

Nkholise says in spite of global upheaval caused by the pandemic, it was also a stellar opportunity for investors to discover founders who are building solutions to tackle future problems, and for founders to connect with visionary investors. “A lot of investors who were active during the pandemic are investors who were saying, this is the best time to recognise great innovators, great founders,” she says. 

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The role of technology in Africa’s agriculture 

About 14 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP comes from agriculture, a sector which employs a majority of the population, particularly women. A vast majority of agro operations in many parts of the continent, however, remain fairly or non-mechanised and poor infrastructure continues to hamper supply chains leading to preventable food losses. What this means is the continent is still reliant on food imports and with increasing spending power, the need to ramp up production and ease supply chain bottlenecks to take agro produce from farm to table while preserving quality is dire.

While the agritech sector in Africa is rising to meet these challenges, Nkholise says there needs to be more focus on farmers and building tools that enable them to optimise production. This includes solutions that educate, upskill and provide quality input and solutions that ensure produce reaches their final consumers in the best quality possible. 

Years down the line, Nkholise says she is hoping to build a global livestock digital supply chain that could “become a touch point of livestock moving from Brazil to China or Australia to Japan or from the US to other parts of Europe.” 

“If we can become the touchpoint for the 54 million cattle that are traded every year around the world, that would be an achievement for us,” she says.