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Agridex, a Solana-based tokenisation platform focused on agricultural commodities, has joined the Fund II portfolio of Launch Africa Ventures, the pan-African venture capital firm announced this week.
The deal, structured as an undisclosed equity round, was led by Launch Africa Ventures and brings together a group of backers with deep ties to the digital payments and real-world asset (RWA) ecosystems, including Circle, WisdomTree, and Utila.
Founded in 2020, the London-based Agridex operates as a B2B payments infrastructure provider for exporters and importers of agricultural commodities such as coffee, tea, flowers, and grain. It is an all-in-one agricultural platform bringing commodity trade on-chain. Built on Solana, it enables producers, exporters, and buyers to settle trades using stablecoins, with full supply chain transparency recorded on the blockchain.
The platform enables cross-border settlements “in under five seconds”, a sharp contrast to the multi-week timelines typical of correspondent banking networks, which have long dominated international trade finance.
Launch Africa Ventures framed the investment as addressing one of the most persistent constraints on African trade. In its announcement, the pan-African VC firm noted that despite billions of dollars in commodities crossing borders annually, the financial infrastructure underpinning those trades has remained slow, costly, and prone to foreign exchange losses for decades. Agridex, the firm said, “collapses” that settlement friction.
Agridex has adopted Utila’s MPC wallet infrastructure to support stablecoin settlements across cross-border trade corridors.
The VC firm cited four main reasons for its investment. First, it described Agridex as purpose-built for agricultural trade rather than a generic payments tool adapted for the sector, saying the platform was built “ground-up for how trade actually works.”
Second, the firm pointed to Agridex’s existing traction, noting the company is already processing live transaction volumes across African trade corridors rather than operating at a theoretical or pilot stage.
Third, Launch Africa Ventures highlighted the quality of Agridex’s existing backers, Circle, WisdomTree, and Utila, as a signal of the company’s standing within the broader RWA and digital payments ecosystem. The fourth and final reason is that the firm pointed to the company’s leadership, led by Henry Duckworth, whom it described as bringing institutional and trade experience that is uncommon in the space.
“We’re increasingly dominant in the continent; and will be soon passing $1 billion of commodities volume traded on our system this year across Africa. As we grow, we welcome working with traders, importers and exporters in the region,” Duckworth mentioned on LinkedIn.
Agridex will use the capital to scale its B2B payment engine, enabling international exporters and importers of coffee, tea, flowers, and grain to settle bulk cross-border transactions in seconds while bypassing traditional multi-week correspondent banking processes.
The company’s sector focus has been described as sitting at the intersection of FinTech and AgTech, operating as a specialised, purpose-built RWA payment stack aimed squarely at resolving settlement bottlenecks in global agricultural commodity trade.
Agridex’s operations span Pan-African and global markets, positioning the company as infrastructure for trade flows that extend beyond the continent while remaining anchored in African commodity corridors.
With the new backing, Agridex joins a small but growing cohort of African-linked FinTech infrastructure companies attempting to tackle one of the continent’s oldest trade bottlenecks: the slow, expensive movement of money that accompanies the physical movement of goods. Whether the five-second settlement claim translates into broad adoption across agricultural exporters and importers will likely determine how significant this round proves to be for the sector at large.
Agridex’s recent backing builds on a series of funding rounds completed in 2024. In May of that year, the company raised $5 million in a pre-Seed round led by Endeavour Ventures, with participation from former Goldman Sachs and Citadel executive Hank Oberoi, sub-Saharan African agricultural group African Crops Limited, and South African vineyard group Oldenburg Vineyards. The round valued Agridex at around $18 million, and Endeavour Ventures co-founder and CEO Bill Cunningham joined the company’s board as part of the deal.
In December 2024, Agridex raised a further $4 million in a strategic funding round led by Portal Ventures, with participation from Endeavour Ventures, HU Investments, FS Ventures, Hawkwood Capital, and Sycamore Gap Management, alongside angel investors including Palantir’s Tobechi Bolanle Taiwo and Perena’s Anna Yuan.
The round brought Agridex’s total funding to $9 million, and the company said the capital would go toward tokenizing and processing pending trade commitments from partners including Future Farms, Oldenburg, and the Parrogate Group, as well as expanding into new commodities such as West African cocoa and Eastern European wheat.
Earlier this year, Agridex announced a partnership with Utila, a provider of institutional digital-asset wallet infrastructure, to support the stablecoin settlement layer underpinning its platform. According to Utila, Agridex has adopted its multi-party computation (MPC) wallet
