“In 2025, we’re still building tools that don’t need internet”: Day 1-1000 of Agrovesto

In 2025, while most tech founders chase AI and fintech glory, Bayo Adewoye is solving a problem few people want to talk about: Building solutions that don’t require the internet.

Bayo Adewoye’s introduction to agriculture wasn’t through a business school case study or a Silicon Valley accelerator. It was through a security guard.

In 2018, Adewoye was living with his uncle in Abuja. The security guard, a farmer’s son from Plateau State who had come to the city to make money for further education, told him a story that would change everything. His father would buy farm produce after harvest, store them in their home, and wait. When prices increased months later, as they inevitably did when supply dwindled, he would sell. That simple strategy paid for the children’s education from primary through secondary school and kept the family comfortable.

“I was like, this actually makes sense,” Adewoye recalls. “Is it possible for me to build a platform where people who are not in the north, somebody in Lagos, can say, ‘I want to buy some commodities, let me store it, and let me make money at the end of the day?’”

That conversation planted the seed for what would become Agrovesto. But the journey from that moment to where the company is today—onboarding 20,000+ farmers onto their NormaOS platform—reveals a fundamental truth about building tech in Nigeria: Sometimes you have to build the infrastructure before you can build the solution.

Day 1: A false start 

Adewoye didn’t start as a tech founder. He studied at university, did his National Youth Service, and worked in banking and investment firms. But he had a plan: build companies across five sectors; oil and gas, agriculture, financial services, ICT, and real estate. Agriculture, he decided, would be first.

In 2018, with the security guard’s story fresh in his mind, Adewoye and three friends started building a commodity trading platform. The vision was to  let urban investors buy agricultural commodities stored in the north and profit from price increases without the logistics headache.

But they weren’t tech people. The platform launched, then promptly crashed. “We didn’t really know much about some of these things,” Adewoye admits.

Then COVID-19 hit.

In May 2020, during the lockdown, Adewoye did something decidedly low-tech: He designed a Google Form. No fancy platform, no crashed servers, just a simple form offering people the chance to invest in commodity trading. He sent it to friends.

“I can tell you that I had close to a million naira that month,” he says. “Someone would pay ₦50,000, another person would pay ₦20,000. They just kept paying money into the account because they wanted to buy commodities, store them, and make money on it.”

It worked because the value proposition was clear, and because during lockdown, people were desperate to find places to put their money. Adewoye used those funds to buy commodities and successfully executed trades. 

Agrovesto was officially in business.

From commodity trading to infrastructure building

By 2021, Adewoye had built a proper trading platform, and people started using it to trade. But he quickly realised the model had fundamental limitations.

“A lot of people were coming to the market trying to buy the same thing, and the funny part, they weren’t even buying from the farmer directly,” he explains. “They were buying from middlemen who had already bought from farmers in their local villages.”

Agrovesto wanted to expand their client base, but if they wanted to sell commodities to companies, they needed to access farmers directly. But Nigerian smallholder farmers are scattered across rural communities, often without smartphones, internet access, or bank accounts. Many don’t even have accurate records of their farm sizes or yields.

This is where most agritech startups fail. They build apps assuming farmers will use them. Agrovesto realised they needed to build something entirely different.

The JICA breakthrough

The turning point came in April 2024, though its seeds were planted earlier. In 2023, Agrovesto participated in an incubation program run by NITDA (Nigeria Information Technology Development Agency), sponsored by JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency).

JICA saw potential in Agrovesto’s work. After the program ended, they reached out with a proposal to conduct an 18-month research project to understand farmers’ daily activities and supply chain processes. They would fund it with $15,000.

For Agrovesto, which had never raised money beyond a $1,000 grant, this was transformative.

“That was the first real funding we got in our entire business life,” Adewoye says. “We were able to hire more people. We were able to do more.”

But more importantly, the project gave them insights no amount of desk research could provide. They mapped out everything; what farmers do from the moment they wake up, how they plant, when they harvest, how they transport crops to market, how much they spend at each stage, who they sell to, and what they earn.

“We covered it like a survey project,” Adewoye explains. “To understand how the farmer thinks, understand their pain points, understand their processes.”

The findings were sobering. Farmers lacked access to credit, quality inputs, mechanisation, accurate market information, and insurance. Most importantly, they had no financial records, meaning banks wouldn’t touch them even when they were processing hundreds of millions of naira annually.

NormaOS: An operating system for Nigerian agriculture

Armed with these insights, Agrovesto launched NomaOS in September 2025. The name comes from “noma,” the Hausa word for farming, and  “OS” for operating system. The metaphor is deliberate: Just as Android and iOS created the foundations for thousands of apps, NormaOS aims to create infrastructure for Nigeria’s agricultural value chain.

But here’s where it gets interesting. NomaOS isn’t just an app for farmers—it’s a data infrastructure platform that brings together all stakeholders in the agricultural ecosystem:

• Farmers and cooperatives (the primary users)
• Input providers (companies selling seeds, fertilizers, chemicals)
• Financial institutions (banks and fintechs offering credit)
• Insurance companies (providing crop and asset insurance)
• Buyers (companies, individuals, and exporters)

The goal is to create comprehensive farmer profiles with verified data: farm sizes (mapped using GPS coordinates), crop yields, financial transactions, loan repayment history, and more. This data then becomes the basis for farmers to access services they’ve been locked out of.

Working around missing infrastructure

But how do you onboard farmers who don’t have smartphones or internet access?

Agrovesto’s answer is multi-layered. First, they work with existing farmer cooperatives rather than individual farmers. Most farmers in Nigeria already belong to cooperatives, registered entities with presidents, secretaries, and treasurers. Agrovesto onboards the cooperative executives, who then bring their members onto the platform.

Second, they’re deploying an agent network. Similar to how mobile money agents work, Agrovesto’s agents are community members who help farmers access the platform. They’re incentivised through commissions, the more they help farmers transact, the more they earn.

“It’s their own business,” Adewoye explains, drawing a comparison to POS  agents. “The more they oversee farmer activities and help them sell products on the platform, the more money they make.”

Third, and most tellingly, Agrovesto just partnered with MTN as part of the MTN Cloud Accelerator program to build a USSD version of the platform. USSD works on any phone, no smartphone or internet required. Farmers can dial a code and access basic platform functions.

“We just partnered with MTN so that we can reach them where they are,” Adewoye says.

Agrovesto is actively thinking about building solutions that don’t require internet access. “Imagine in 2025, we are thinking of building a tool that doesn’t require internet access,” he says, his frustration evident. “That’s like going backwards. What other countries are already thinking about how they can do something bigger than the internet, we are thinking of how we can build a solution that doesn’t even require internet in the first place.”

The problem runs deeper than connectivity. A few weeks ago, Agrovesto tried to map a farm in Edo State using GPS equipment. When they arrived, they discovered there was no internet coverage. The mapping couldn’t happen.

“The moment you carry your equipment to that place and want to map the farm, you discover that there’s no internet. It’s just blank,” Adewoye recounts.

Then there’s the data problem. Nigeria has no centralised, reliable database of farmer information. The Federal Ministry of Agriculture claims to have farmer data, but “you go and check those data, maybe it’s only on Excel,” Adewoye says. “You’ll be wondering, is this the data I want to use to build a solution that can work for farmers?”

For a company building data infrastructure, these gaps are existential challenges. Unlike fintech startups that can plug into existing payment rails like NIBSS or Interswitch, Agrovesto has to build everything from scratch.

“As a startup, you’re not supposed to be the one doing everything,” Adewoye notes. “You really want to scale faster with little funding. You need to stand on the shoulders of existing infrastructure. Imagine if there’s no NIBSS, no Interswitch, fintechs would not thrive.”

In agriculture, those giants’ shoulders don’t exist yet.

The wealth of Nigerian farmers

One of Adewoye’s most striking observations is about farmers’ actual economic activity versus their recorded financial history.

“I tell you that a typical Nigerian farmer is technically rich,” he says. “The only difference is that you might not see it in their body that they are rich because they don’t know how to manage their money. That’s why you see them looking as if they don’t have money. But they have money.”

He describes some farmers processing hundreds of thousands of naira every six months. But because these transactions happen in cash or through fragmented channels, there’s no formal record.

Here’s how it works: A buyer wants to purchase a food truck of soybeans—worth about ₦22 million ($15,167). Instead of paying directly to the farmer’s registered farm business account, the buyer might pay to a random POS agent in the village. The POS agent collects the cash and gives it to the farmer.

“That transaction has happened, but at the end of the day, if a bank wants to assess this farmer (financial history), the farmer doesn’t have any record as far as the bank is concerned,” Adewoye explains. “That money does not pass through any proper financial rail. So we are now coming in and saying, instead of you routing to all these channels that don’t have access to financial institutions, let us help you have a proper record.”

It’s the classic formalisation challenge that has bedeviled development economists for decades. Agrovesto’s approach is to make formalisation attractive by tying it to services farmers desperately want: credit, quality inputs, mechanisation, and access to premium buyers.

Becoming Africa’s agricultural infrastructure layer

Adewoye’s vision extends beyond Agrovesto’s immediate operations. He wants to build something that other companies can build on.

It’s an audacious goal, requiring years of patient infrastructure building with no immediate returns. But Adewoye is playing the long game.The company’s business model is straightforward: They take a small commission on transactions facilitated through the platform—whether it’s connecting farmers to buyers, facilitating input financing, or enabling credit access. As the platform scales and more transactions flow through it, the economics improve.

The bigger picture: Food security through financial inclusion

Agrovesto’s theory of change is that by de-risking agricultural lending and enabling farmers to access financing, inputs, and markets, they can unlock massive productivity gains. A farmer with five hectares who can only afford to cultivate one could suddenly cultivate all five. Multiply that across thousands of farmers, and you have significant food supply increases which should lower prices.

It’s infrastructure thinking applied to food security: build the pipes, and the water flows more efficiently.

Adewoye is candid about the challenges ahead. Building infrastructure is unglamorous, capital-intensive work. There are no viral growth curves or sexy consumer metrics. Just the slow, methodical work of mapping farms, onboarding cooperatives, verifying data, and building trust with both farmers and financiers.

For Adewoye and Agrovesto, the path forward is clear: keep building infrastructure, keep onboarding farmers, keep creating the data layer that Nigeria’s agricultural sector desperately needs. It’s thankless work. It’s slow work. It’s necessary work.

And if they succeed, they won’t just have built a successful company, they’ll have built the foundation for dozens of other companies to succeed, too.

Recommended Reading: Day 1-1000 of Regxta; the daughter who rebuilt her mother’s kolo digitally