Executive Summary 

The past decade has witnessed an explosion in the global supply of digitalization for agriculture (D4Ag) innovation.
Across the regions that comprise the focus of this report—Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), South Asia (SA), Southeast Asia (SEA), and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (hereafter collectively referred to as “LMICs” (low- and middle-income countries))—we identified nearly 1,400 currently active D4Ag solutions.

These solutions represent six different D4Ag use cases: Advisory & Information, Market Linkages & Access, Financial Access, Supply Chain Management, Enterprise Management & Efficiency, and Enterprise R&D. The largest proportion is headquartered in sub-Saharan Africa (50%), though a significant number of D4Ag solutions hail from South Asia (21%) and Latin America and the Caribbean (18%) regions.

Despite showing the largest per-annum growth rate in the number of D4Ag solutions of any region over both the past five and ten years, respectively, Southeast Asia still accounts for a relatively small share of the total (7%). The remainder (~4%) are active in but headquartered outside of the LMIC regions of focus (i.e., in North America, Europe, Northeast Asia, or the Middle East). Growth in the number of D4Ag solutions is decelerating.

While nearly half of all D4Ag solutions active in LMICs were started in the past five years, there is a clear nd consistent slowdown in the annual rate of new D4Ag solutions entering the market. The cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR) of the number of D4Ag solutions from 2012 to 2018 (33% p.a.) was more than three times larger than that for the next four years, from 2018 to 2022 (9% p.a.). The trend of deceleration is common to every region, including relative upstart Southeast Asia.

The deceleration certainly reflects a blend of increasing market maturity, consolidation, rationalization, and even COVID-19 impact—especially as sub- scale innovators start to close their doors and some venture-invested companies have shown themselves to be at the end of their ropes.