Heave Ventures, a venture capitalist in Nigeria’s Tech Ventures ecosystem, has a core in identifying the right problems, supporting startups with talent and training, and working with banks and development institutions to fuel growth.
Their work has recently focused on Agritech where they have driven over $4 million in capital towards Agritech ventures.
When these ventures scale successfully, their model could help modernise agriculture, enhance food security, and create economic value across value chains.
Heave Ventures is leveling up to continue facilitating the growth of agritech in Nigeria by bridging innovation, finance and advisory support which will help unlock the potential of agriculture not just as subsistence farming, but as high-growth, tech-enabled industry with jobs, exports and rural transformation.
In 2025, Heave Ventures teamed with FCMB and FMO on the ‘FCMB–FMO AgriTech Investment Readiness Programme’. An initiative which features a grant pool of N20 million and uses a proprietary fundability-readiness-scoring platform, ‘Zimara’ to identify startups that are bankable and funding-ready.
“We created Zimara, a digital platform to prepare SMEs to be more profitable and ready for investment. In just six weeks, over 13,000 businesses signed up. That tells you the hunger for financing opportunities in Africa,” Abiodun Lawal, CEO of Heave Ventures, said at an event in Lagos.
“Traditional finance doesn’t work for many small businesses, and alternative finance players are not enough, so Zimara prepared these ventures to become more attractive to existing financial pools,” he noted.
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Heave Ventures is powered by a multi-disciplinary team of experts, including innovation managers, product designers, product managers, researchers, engineers, investors, and founders which enables them to provide comprehensive support to impact-based startups across Africa.
The company takes a major role in managing large-scale agritech innovation programmes in Nigeria.
In 2024, in collaboration with First City Monument Bank (FCMB) and FMO (the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank), Heave Ventures ran an agritech hackathon, a venture-building programme aimed at addressing issues like credit access, infrastructure gaps and food security.
Lawal, CEO of Heave Ventures, noted that the ultimate goal of the FCMB-FMO AgriTech program is not just to fund startups but to redefine how agricultural businesses grow and access finance in Africa.
“We are building the tools and platforms that help SMEs become investor-ready. We are the pre-assessment before the bank, helping ensure that great ideas don’t die because of a lack of access to capital,” he said.
By facilitating hackathons and venture-building programs, Heave Ventures is helping uncover solutions that target persistent agribusiness problems such as credit access for farmers, infrastructure challenges, and technology-enabled services.
Rather than simply handing out grants, they go the extra mile to nurture potentials through mentorship, digital training, and readiness-scoring so that startups are better positioned for growth and further investment.
An example is during the 2024 hackathon managed by Heave Ventures, over 450 teams from Nigeria and other African countries submitted solutions, with the top winners receiving around N23 million in combined prizes, according to Agribusiness Africa.
One of the winners – Agrocist, a startup using AI to detect livestock diseases and offering veterinary services to farmers, secured about N6 million after winning the programme.
Another winner is FarmSlate, who uses AI, IoT and geospatial analytics to link smallholder farmers with financiers, won N3.5 million and a place in the venture-building phase.
