Kuronga

Kuronga is an AI-driven platform that empowers small-scale farmers to assess the quality of their produce using only a smartphone. Farmers upload crop images—starting with tomatoes—and receive instant feedback on ripeness, blemishes, and packing condition. Kuronga then matches them with buyers seeking their specific quality grade, unlocking fairer prices and reducing post-harvest losses.

Africa’s smallholder farmers face mounting post-harvest losses and limited market access due to:

Poor handling and lack of standardized quality grading

Low returns despite producing high-quality crops

Market rejections due to inconsistent standards

Environmental waste of land, water, and energy on unsold produce

Kuronga’s models analyze crop images using deep learning to provide:

Instant quality grading from smartphone images

Feedback on ripeness, blemishes, uniformity, and packaging

Buyer matching for quality-specific produce

AI Models Powering Kuronga:

MobileNetV2: Lightweight CNN for smartphone grading

EfficientNet & ViTs: Planned for deeper, more accurate models

YOLOv8: Detects and grades individual fruits in crates (bulk mode)

Continuous learning from annotated farm and market image datasets

Every year, African farmers lose billions due to poor post-harvest handling and limited access to formal markets. Kuronga bridges the gap between smallholder growers and buyers by using AI-powered grading tools that bring transparency and trust to fresh produce quality. By empowering farmers with instant quality insights and market access, Kuronga helps reduce waste, boost incomes, and make Africa’s food systems more efficient and inclusive.

B2B2C digital marketplace model

Free grading tool for farmers → buyer match → platform commission

Premium features for agribusinesses, cooperatives, and buyers

Working prototype live

Won $100K Milken-Motsepe 4IR Award for innovation in AgriTech

Expanding image dataset across crops and geographies

Mobile app optimized for low-connectivity environments

GPUs (V100 or A100) for deep model training and experimentation

2–5 TB cloud storage for annotated image datasets and model checkpoints

High-memory compute (64+ GB RAM) for multi-crop scaling

Edge optimization tools for mobile hardware deployment

Support AI for agriculture. Help us give every African farmer a digital quality grader in their pocket—and a direct line to buyers.