From the forests of India to the coffee farms of Colombia to the drought-prone fields of Somalia, a new group of innovators is reimagining what resilience looks like for the world’s smallholder farmers. VentureWell is proud to announce the 10 ventures selected for Phase 1 of the Moonshots for Development (M4D) Open Innovation Challenge, a global cohort building the tools that rural communities need to withstand a changing climate and an uncertain global economy.
These 10 teams rose to the top of a global call for solutions. From a pool of over 1,550 applicants, 22 teams were selected for the introductory Bootcamp stage, with proposed pilots in 27 countries. Over half of the applications came from women-led (56%) and youth-led (64%) ventures. These applicants participated in a month of hands-on mentorship, working directly with industry leaders and development experts. A competitive review process narrowed the field to 10 Phase 1 teams, each receiving $10,000 in non-dilutive awards and three months of coaching.
Spanning three continents, the selected teams are developing a wide range of technologies, with innovations ranging from AI-powered farm advice delivered via WhatsApp to satellite-driven crop insurance to community-owned forest food systems. What unites them is a shared ambition: to put powerful, practical innovation directly into the hands of the people who need it most.
Inside the Challenge, and VentureWell’s Role
Moonshots for Development is a global alliance that strengthens the innovation ecosystem by bringing together International Financial Institutions (IFIs), Multilateral Development Banks, and mission-aligned organizations. Together, these partners co-create, co-finance, and scale transformative solutions built for smallholder farmers, rural communities, and Indigenous populations.
The Open Innovation Challenge is anchored by a $2 million grant sponsored by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and co-financed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB LAB), the European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability (EIIS), and the European Space Agency (ESA). This broad support coalition includes the Accelerate for Impact Platform (A4IP) of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT; CGIAR; and the International Innovation Hub, as well as other members of the M4D Alliance. Its strength lies in the pioneering vision of pooling the expertise, reach, and capital of institutions that seldom work in such close concert.
VentureWell is proud to serve as the implementation partner for the Open Innovation Challenge, designing, delivering, and administering the program on behalf of the alliance. This end-to-end management includes sourcing and evaluating ventures from around the world, structuring a multi-stage program, coordinating validation and mentorship, and stewarding milestone-based, non-equity funding as teams advance.
Selected enterprises can access up to $360,000 in non-equity funding and the opportunity to pilot solutions directly alongside IFAD Country Offices and partner organizations. Altogether, the challenge will award up to $1 million total to breakthrough ventures. This year’s initiative builds on a successful 2023 pilot that awarded $200,000 and demonstrated the potential of strategic innovation partnerships within the development finance ecosystem.
“Scaling breakthrough technologies to solve complex global challenges requires strong partnerships and collective ingenuity,” said Phil Weilerstein, VentureWell president and CEO. “We’re excited to bring our experience supporting innovators to this global effort, and to help ventures position their ideas for tangible impact.”
Four Tracks, One Goal: Resilient Rural Food Systems
To be eligible for this phase, applicants were required to align their solution with one of four thematic tracks that reflect shared priorities across the M4D partners:
- Agroecology for Productive, Climate-Resilient Systems: advancing biodiverse, regenerative approaches to production
- Digital Extension for Accountable Service Delivery: putting timely, trusted guidance directly in farmers’ hands
- Insurance Solutions for Resilient Food Systems: protecting vulnerable producers against climate and market shocks
- Reducing the Drivers of Fragility: strengthening resilience in the toughest operating environments
All four tracks emphasize artificial intelligence (AI) and geospatial analysis—tools that can dramatically extend the reach and precision of solutions for smallholder farmers. The selected teams reflect that ambition, and while each is grounded in a single track, many bridge several approaches to address complex challenges from multiple angles.
Meet the Cohort
Agroecology for Productive, Climate-Resilient Systems
The Open Field (India) is a climatetech startup that is building resilient, traceable forest food systems alongside Indigenous and forest-dependent communities. Its digital operating system, Forest OS, maps trees, households, harvests, and market flows to enable transparent pricing and community governance. Deployed through solar-powered, community-run hubs located near forests, the platform reduces post-harvest loss, stabilizes producer incomes, and connects more than 500 smallholders to reliable supply chains.
Humble Bee (India) turns beehives into climate-resilient assets owned by rural women. The enterprise organizes women into beekeeping clusters, deploys precision hives, and manages multi-seasonal pollination through planned migrations. Its BEEKIND platform uses AI and geospatial intelligence to optimize hive placement and predict flowering cycles. Over two years, Humble Bee has empowered more than 2,500 women and deployed over 8,000 hives across 10 Indian states, with local youth ensuring last-mile execution.
Farmers for Forests (Philippines, Kenya) pairs biodiverse agroforestry with AI-enabled monitoring and carbon finance to build climate-resilient farming systems. Its geospatial and AI stack detects trees and estimates carbon with roughly 90% accuracy using drone imagery, opening transparent access to carbon markets. Combined with plantation support, technical assistance, and financing, the model has helped farmers increase incomes three- to five-fold and now reaches 35,000 households in India as it works toward a globally deployable platform.
aQysta (Nepal, Malawi) brings multidisciplinary expertise and a team of more than 75 staff across Nepal, Malawi, and India, supported by a Netherlands-based management team. Its model translates buyer demand directly into farmer production, creating a commercially self-sustaining system that scales without grant dependency, while an in-house digital enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and local agronomy teams work hand in hand with smallholders. The company is backed by Ecosia, a mission-aligned partner investing in smallholder agroforestry.
Digital Extension for Accountable Service Delivery
HacerPerú (Colombia, Panama, Brazil, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic) builds and deploys MAIA, an AI-powered agricultural advisory platform delivered via WhatsApp to smallholders and rural enterprises. MAIA offers personalized business coaching at roughly one-hundredth the cost of traditional extension, with a strong focus on women’s inclusion, and is deployed using the International Labour Organization’s LABOR methodology in partnership with local cooperatives and government agencies. An independent evaluation of Colombian coffee growers found an 8.5-fold increase in formalization and a 55% implementation rate of MAIA’s recommendations.
SenzAgro (Sri Lanka) addresses smallholder vulnerability to weather and market volatility through an AI-powered digital extension system. The platform has reached 24,000 farmers via WhatsApp and SMS, delivering real-time guidance on planting, irrigation, and crop protection, and its government- and NGO-backed pilots have reduced crop loss and increased farmer incomes by up to 15%. Its AgriCore platform connects farmers, field officers, and enterprises to ensure end-to-end traceability.
Insurance Solutions for Resilient Food Systems
IBISA (Philippines) is a global climate insurance technology company that designs and operates parametric insurance to protect vulnerable communities, agribusinesses, and financial institutions. Drawing on satellite and Earth observation data, its platform integrates climate analytics and actuarial modeling to automate payouts for risks such as drought, excess rainfall, and typhoons. IBISA partners with local insurers and global reinsurers to deliver transparent, scalable climate risk protection.
Adorsho praniSheba Limited (Bangladesh, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Pakistan) is a Bangladesh-based agriculture and insurance technology company that uses fourth industrial revolution technology to de-risk smallholder livestock farming. Its ecosystem features biometric cattle insurance built on muzzle-pattern digital IDs that prevent fraud and speed claims, alongside 24/7 digital veterinary support, Internet of Things–enabled climate alerts, and market linkages through its digital shop. By securing livestock assets, the company helps smallholders access microfinance and loans through seven live insurance partners.
Nuru Solutions (Somalia, Kenya) builds the data infrastructure that makes smallholder agricultural insurance viable at scale. Combining AI and geospatial analysis, its platform delivers precise farm boundary detection, real-time crop monitoring, historical yield baselines, and automated loss assessments, allowing insurers to design and administer parametric and livestock insurance with minimized basis risk across complex value chains in some of the world’s most fragile markets.
Reducing the Drivers of Fragility
Otavalo Alba (OA7) Ingenierías (Ecuador, Colombia, Peru) is a geospatial and AI company developing digital tools that support rural communities, Indigenous populations, and public institutions in land management and climate resilience. By combining drone data, satellite imagery, and geographic information systems, the company produces decision-support tools and automated land reports that improve agricultural planning, drawing on extensive experience with international institutions—including the World Bank—to build web-based territorial planning platforms.
Our Vision for Global Innovation
For over 30 years, VentureWell has helped early-stage inventors turn bold ideas into ventures that improve lives, and that work has become increasingly global, with program participants from 107 countries. Across our programs, we have trained more than 21,000 individuals, whose ventures have gone on to found over 7,000 businesses and raise upward of $9.8 billion in follow-on funding. Through the Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST) Initiative, stewarded on behalf of the U.S. Department of State, we reached innovators in more than 130 emerging economies. Those numbers point to an underlying truth: Talent is universal, but opportunity is not. Great ideas emerge everywhere, yet the funding, mentorship, and networks that turn ideas into impact remain concentrated in a handful of places. Our global work—with GIST and Innovate Egypt and partnerships with organizations like Swiss Re and programs such as Shine India—is built to close that gap. We have seen that the most durable solutions are not exported into a community but built by and with the people who live there.
That is the philosophy at the heart of the M4D Open Innovation Challenge. Emerging economies are not simply markets to be served; they are engines of invention, pursuing innovation pathways of their own. Our role is to help remove the barriers in the way, and to connect local ingenuity to the global resources that can help it scale.
Over the coming months, VentureWell will work closely with these 10 ventures and with our M4D partners to validate their solutions, sharpen their models, and open real pathways to pilot with IFAD and partner programs. Each of these teams is already changing what is possible for the farmers and communities they serve. We look forward to providing the resources and expertise needed to move these innovations to implementation.