Capital Raise: Applied AI Infrastructure for African Agriculture (Institutional Traction, Platform Built)

I'm working with Moja, an AI-first digital platform operating at the intersection of agriculture, education, and data infrastructure across Sub-Saharan Africa, and helping lead a capital raise for its next phase: Moja AI Lab. Moja is not a concept-stage AI startup. Over the past several years, the team has built and deployed a functioning platform already active in Malawi, with expansion underway into South Africa and adjacent markets. The platform integrates three core layers: (1) Moja Academy (low-bandwidth training and certification), (2) Moja Market (market access and value-chain commerce), and (3) Moja Connect (peer, institutional, and extension networks). Together, these layers generate real, longitudinal field data—learning behavior, agronomic practices, market activity, and institutional engagement—that most AI-first startups never see. Moja AI Lab is a newly formed subsidiary designed to convert this operational footprint into applied intelligence: soil health and regenerative agriculture models, fertilizer and input optimization, multilingual advisory tools, and decision-ready analytics for institutions, input providers, and financiers. The emphasis is not chatbots, but decision intelligence embedded in real economic workflows. The market is large and undercapitalized. Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural economy is approaching $1T, yet remains structurally data-poor. Less than 1% of global AI investment reaches the continent, despite clear validation that AI-enabled advisory and soil intelligence can scale when delivered through trusted, low-bandwidth channels. Moja’s differentiation is architectural: it is building intelligence on top of an existing platform with users, partners, and institutional trust—rather than attempting to manufacture data later. We are raising $$2.5M via SAFE to complete productization of Moja AI Lab, convert existing pilots into paid institutional deployments, expand data ingestion and modeling infrastructure, and support initial regional scale through anchor partners. Happy to share the deck and speak with investors who are interested in applied AI, agri-infrastructure, and platforms with real-world deployment rather than speculative models. Tavis