MICROCAPITAL BRIEF: Fintech Oko secures $ 500k in equity from Catapult, individual investors to extend agricultural insurance to Ivory Coast
Oko Finance, an agricultural insurance company active in Mali and Uganda, recently raised $ 500,000 in equity to expand its Côte d’Ivoire business. Founded in 2017 and based in Mali, Oko insures 15,000 farmers who grow cotton, grain and coffee in partnership with local insurance companies, using satellite data to make payments when variables such as precipitation exceed or do not exceed pre-arranged benchmarks. Oko policies – whose premiums averaged $ 20 per season from 2021 – can be purchased via the Orange Money payment app for Orange, a France-based telecommunications company, without the need for a smartphone. The Germany-based insurance company Allianz Group is also an implementation partner for Oko.
The investment package comes from Katapult, a Norway-based “impact tech accelerator” and three people, Henry Allard, Lionel Dorie and Guillaume Leenhardt. Catapult was founded in 2016 and manages $ 100 million in assets invested in 145 companies in 37 countries as of 2022.
Orange was founded in 1988 and is a mobile network operator and provider of digital services. As of 2020, the company served 259 million customers in 26 countries and employed 142,000 people. In 2022, it reported recent annual revenue of EUR 42.5 billion (USD 43.5 billion).
Founded in Berlin in 1890, the Allianz Group offers insurance and asset management services to 100 million customers in 70 countries. For 2021, it reported an operating profit of EUR 3.5 billion (USD 3.58 billion) which ended the year with total assets of EUR 2.6 trillion (USD 2.66 trillion).
Sources and additional resources
Disrupt Africa article
AgFunderNews article on Oko
Catapult website
Oko website
OKO partner site
/ partners
Alliance annual report 2021
Orange website
Orange overview presentation
/ group / overview / orange-group-explore-our-actions-pictures
Previous MicroCapital article on Allianz
Previous MicroCapital article on Orange
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