Innovative, modern solutions for efficient farmers

About Synnefa

Our mission is to eliminate risks and improve incomes for 1,000,000 farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Our vision is a world where African smallholder farmers generate a legacy of thriving farms for future generations.

Synnefa, a Greek word for 'cloud', is crucial for both farmers who need clouds for rain and technology developers who rely on Cloud infrastructure for their applications.

If you are an investor or donor looking to back us, hear directly from our Founder and CEO by visiting our new investor relations page here.

Our agricultural philosophy

Farmers face compounding challenges of climate change, decreasing land sizes, soil erosion, inadequate supply chains, unpredictable markets and poor access to capital which trap them in poverty.

They simply lack control!

To solve for all these challenges is hard! There is no shortcut or silver bullet that will solve for all these challenges farmers face today. We believe that a multi approach to the challenges farmers face is what it will take to move the dot and create the impact we want to see. Once we see this impact, we need to take it to scale.

Our Theory of Change is that if we build and finance climate smart farming tools for farmers, then they will grow high value crops year-round while using fewer resources, and their incomes will improve.

Our strategy to reach scale is focusing on making our products and services good enough, simple enough to be used and cheap enough for a market size that is big enough. We call it the 4 enoughs for scale.

Working together with farmers

Our company slogan is making complex farming feel simple! because that’s what we do every day. We push ourselves to create solutions that will make complex farming feel simple.

Growing food deserves to be easy when using modern farming solutions.We do this by partnering with farmers to provide them with affordable modern farming solutions to increase efficiency and improve production. We want farmers to do what they love most-farming! and leave all the heavy lifting to us!

The Synnefa journey started with a dream

Jan 2013

We hatched! Founded by 2 broke friends on campus.

Jan 2014

Incorporated and began building with Arduino boards in the hostels.

August 2014

The first prototype built and deployed at the foot of Mt.Kilimanjaro. Crushed within 7 days!

Dec 2015

Hired our first employee and reached 100 farms.

Feb 2015

Used Raspberry pi and worked amazing signed up 50 pre-orders.

November 2014

iHub loves our work! offers us office space and incubation. Finally moved out of our hostels! Yeeiii.

June 2016

President Obama comes to Kenya and loves our pitch, invites us to the US and offers us partnership and our first funding $15000 from AAAS

Jan 2017

V3 comes out better and smarter with solar power, everything we ever wanted. hired our employee #10

March 2018

Rapid testing and reiterations of V3. then backed by USADF, ASME SPRING $110 000 for further development

Jan 2020

Innovate UK joins our cause and backs us with $856 000 to build v4 powered by AI

Aug 2019

Reached farmer 1000 and rebranded from a pure tech company to a farming partner

July 2018

Bagged BRCK to develop V3 on their new picoBRCK, our first angel investor says yes to back us

Sept 2021

We secured our pre-seed round lead by Founders Factory Africa and Water and Energy for Food. Rebranded from Illuminum Greenhouses to Synnefa

Meet the Synnefa Team

Taita Ngetich
CEO
Peter Gichuhi
CTO
Nessa Maina
Senior Maintenance Engineer
Sarah Owuor
Customer Support
Njoki Mungai
Office Assistant
Catherine Gathoni
Junior QA Engineer
Timothy Lubanga
Senior Backend Developer
Janet Machuka
Social Media and Content Manager
Daniel Karisa
Junior Accountant
Victorine Amani
UI/UX Developer
Collins Kiplangat
Frontend Developer
Leah Wangu
Grants and Partnerships Associate