Uka Eje
Co-founder & CEO,
Thrive Agric
Uka Eje is an agricultural enthusiast with over 7 years of extensive experience in the agribusiness space. He is a graduate of Biochemistry from Covenant University and has been trained by Ventures Platform, Google Developers Launchpad, and YCombinator on business, leadership, innovation, and management.
He is the Co-founder and CEO of Thrive Agric, an agricultural technology-enabled company that works with smallholder farmers in Nigeria to give them access to loans through linkages with institutional investors and crowdfunding, with this Thrive Agric has been able to provide tech-enabled farming services, data-driven advisory and increased yield per hectare for smallholder farmers in Nigeria and link them to premium market. So far, Thrive Agric has gone ahead to fund over 15,000 farmers spread across 12 states in Nigeria. Thrive Agric got selected to participate in the Google Developers Launchpad and was awarded the 2018 Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) Leadership award in social enterprise by the Nigerian Mandela Washington Fellowship Alumni Association also during the Africa CEO summit last year Thrive Agric was selected as one of the most promising Startups in Africa.
In 2019 Thrive Agric was selected by YCombinator during the Winter 2019 batch and the Go Global Africa fund of 2019. Uka is passionate about using technology to solve agricultural problems with an end goal of building an Africa that feeds the world and itself.