Evaluating only AgroFinPE’s profile at its peak — without knowing the outcome — the model ranked Unit economics as the #1 likely cause. That’s exactly how it died.
Key Events Timeline
FOUNDING
FUNDING
MILESTONE
CRISIS
SHUTDOWN
Full Analysis
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Documented cause
AgroFinPE built a digital lending platform for Peruvian coffee and cacao smallholder farmers, offering pre-harvest credit using crop data and satellite monitoring for underwriting. The platform disbursed $4.2M in agricultural loans across 850 smallholder clients. A global coffee price collapse in 2022-2023 reduced farmer revenues by 35%, triggering mass loan defaults across the portfolio. NPL ratios hit 28% in Q1 2023. The company had insufficient capital reserves to absorb the losses and could not raise emergency capital as agricultural fintech became uninvestable during the rising interest rate environment.
Lesson
“Before building an agricultural lending book on a single crop (coffee, cacao, etc.), size your capital reserves for a 40% commodity price decline scenario. Alternatively, diversify across uncorrelated crops to reduce portfolio correlation risk.”
Failure anatomy
Collapse type
Slow Death
🐌 LOW
Hype cycle
Decline
Moat type
Data
Fatal mistake
Coffee price volatility made agricultural loan NPLs unpredictable