Pomona Impact Foundation’s AgTech accelerator

Following positive feedback, Argidius and Pomona Impact Foundation entered partnership in 2018 to expand its programming to serve more AgTech entrepreneurs in the region. The two-year project initially planned to run from 2018-2020 was extended for an additional two years. By the end of 2021:

• 121 enterprises had been supported.
• the median size of these enterprises prior to support was €78,000; and
• the cost of support averaged out at €7,000 per enterprise.
• €32 million in incremental revenues had been generated by these enterprises (although half of these was generated by one enterprise alone).
• at a ROTI of 38;
• 218 full time jobs have been created;
• and an additional €7 million of finance has been mobilized.

 In 2021 an evaluation was conducted to assess the effectiveness of the acceleration services and if and how these services contributed to the success of supported enterprises.

Key findings

• There is evidence of contribution to changes in performance for the majority of supported enterprises.
• 7/10 interviewed enterprises demonstrated clearly how they benefited from the programme, whereas no contribution to changes in financial performance were found with the other 3 case studied enterprises.
• SGBs valued the flexibility, guidance and facilitation of Pomona’s advisors, and generally found standard tools and templates focused on strategy and investment readiness useful. This is reflected in 70% of the interviewed SGBs feeding back that the programme was instrumental in enhancing their strategic planning processes and for 50%, Pomona helped them to improve their business models, value proposition and financial and forecasting processes. A subset too improved their corporate governance.
• On the program delivery side, a switch to hybrid online/offline delivery improved the effectiveness of the program by lengthening the delivery from 2.5months to 6months, allowing SGBs could work at their own pace, without compromising business operations and allowing them to reach out to other team members for consultation, when needed, and by enabling a more personalized approach by PIF staff to support and guide SGBs to clarify their value proposition and business models and to unlock growth paths.
• However, Pomona’s effectiveness was observed to be highly variable and dependent on each program’s intentions, level of flexibility, sponsor involved, and profile of supported enterprise.
• There is an opportunity to improve the program side by developing a mentoring component and build in peer-to-peer learning and networking to enable sector specific problem solving, peer interaction and network development.
• The evaluation also identified corporate governance and organizational performance issues that pose risks going forward. Pomona recognizes these and before the closure of the evaluation had started taking steps to address.