Trellis: Acumen Pioneer Agriculture Initiative

Acumen has launched a new pioneer agriculture initiative, Trellis, a 5-year, 25M GBP initiative that will make up to 25-30 investments in early-stage agri-business entrepreneurs across four investment regions in East Africa, West Africa, India, and Latin America from 2022-2027, impacting 2 million farmers. Trellis focuses on providing high risk, early-stage patient capital for pioneering agri-enterprises with a focus on building climate resilience and delivering high impact solutions to increase productivity and access to markets for smallholder farmers globally. Critical to the investments will be generating evidence, insights and impact measurement. Trellis will focus on proving out replicable and scalable business models and linking these investments to more commercial funds, including Acumen’s Resilient Agriculture Fund (ARAF). Agri-business entrepreneurs face an extraordinary set of challenges. The lack of equity capital for early-stage companies with evolving business models operating in untested markets is the barrier most often cited by entrepreneurs. High-risk, early-stage equity and equity-like capital is critical to fuel a new generation of innovations at the intersection of agriculture, poverty, gender and climate resilience. Alongside this is a need for insights and evidence generation on what works, and investment support – “accompaniment” - as Acumen focuses on local entrepreneurs and building out local ecosystems. Through equity investments in innovative, early-stage agribusinesses Trellis will transform the incomes, livelihoods, and climate resilience of 2 million smallholder farmers. In doing so the initiative will provide replicable examples of business models that drive deep impact to smallholder farmers, while also growing financially viable enterprises.