It started with a crop nobody could name.
Origin
In December 2023, Sani Kabiru sat with a farmer in his home village in Soba LGA who had lost half his sorghum crop to a mould he had never seen before. The nearest extension worker had last visited 14 months earlier.
Sani recognised it immediately as aflatoxin-contaminated grain. He had spent six years as a field agronomist and it took him seconds. But he was not always going to be there, and there are 4.2 million farmers in Kaduna State and roughly one extension worker for every 3,200 of them.
He took out his phone and typed the description into every AI tool he could find. They gave him American extension service links, guidance written for Iowa corn, and drug brand names not sold anywhere in Nigeria.
He called Amaka. “I need to build something,” he said, “that knows what Nigerian crops look like when they are sick.”
Seven people. Two of them live in the pilot villages.
Sani Kabiru
CEO and co-founder
BSc Agriculture, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. Six years as a field agronomist across Kaduna and Kano with Olam Nigeria. Left in 2023 after building a manual WhatsApp advisory service for 40 farmers in his home village, and watching it stop scaling the moment it reached 200.
Every farmer I grew up with knows how to farm. What they do not have is the information that commercial farms take for granted. That is what Loamdoc is. An information gap closed.
Amaka Okorie
CTO and co-founder
BSc Computer Science, Enugu State University of Technology. Three years as a full-stack engineer at Farmcrowdy in Lagos, which gave her direct experience of agri-data problems. Deep expertise in image processing, PWA architecture and offline-first systems.
The product had to work on a N35,000 Tecno phone with intermittent data. That constraint is not a limitation. It is the design specification.
Pieter van den Berg
Head of Product
MSc Agricultural Sciences, Wageningen University. Eight years building AgriTech products in the Netherlands, Kenya and Ghana. Met Sani at an IFAD AgriTech showcase in Abuja in February 2024 and joined the founding team as an equity partner.
Rukayya Danlami
Head of Field Operations
Diploma in Agricultural Extension, Kaduna State College of Agriculture. Four years as a government extension worker. Joined Loamdoc in January 2025 and runs the Kaduna pilot zone and farmer onboarding.
Beyond the co-founders, Loamdoc employs four field agronomists based permanently in the pilot communities. They train farmers on the app, validate diagnoses against what is actually in the field, and feed that back into our training data. A diagnosis nobody has checked in person is a guess with good typography.
Two years, eight communities.
- Dec 2023
Soba LGA, Kaduna
Sani sits with a farmer who has lost half a sorghum crop to a mould he has never seen. The nearest extension worker last visited 14 months ago.
- Feb 2024
First test scans
Early prototype. Twelve farmers.
- May 2024
Loam Agritech Ltd. incorporated
Kaduna State, Nigeria.
- Jun 2024
IFAD grant
N6M from the West Africa Rural Development programme.
- Jul 2024
Pre-seed closed
N14M.
- Aug 2024
Pieter joins
Co-founder and equity partner.
- Oct 2024
Pilot launch
Eight communities, roughly 400 farmers.
- Feb 2025
1,200 farmers
4,400 crop scans processed.
- Q4 2025
Niger State programme
Government pilot and public launch.
What we will not trade away.
- 01
Works where the farmer works
If it does not function on a N35,000 Tecno with 2G data in a field outside Soba, it does not ship. The weight of our JavaScript is not a performance metric here. It is whether the farmer gets an answer at all.
- 02
Advice must be actionable and local
Apply 30kg/ha of NPK compound is only useful if you also say which brand is on the shelf at the nearest agro-dealer, and what it costs. We do that.
- 03
The farmer’s data belongs to the farmer
We do not sell individual farm data to agribusinesses without explicit, informed consent. Not for a grant, not for a partnership.