The Rootical Times #5
Recruiting future founders for our 2025 Cohort, preparing for the official launch of 4 Rootical businesses, onboarding a new talent manager, representing Rootical in a series of international events, advancing 2 new business explorations… the past couple of months 🔥 Rootical 🔥 has been on fire !
When times get busy, with a lot of pieces moving, updating the Rootical Times is often at risk of falling off the priority list. But, hey, that means we’re full on in the action, which is good!
Celebrating Achievements
We have had a number of important milestones to celebrate:
👩🏾🌾 2000+ Smallholder Farmers have already been served by Rootical's portfolio companies, and we're just getting started.
🇺🇬 BIG NEWS 🇺🇬 Rootical Ventures Uganda Ltd. was legally established on October 31st, 2024, 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝-𝐨𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐲 of Uganda, East-Africa and probably the entire continent.
🚀 The legal incorporation of our first portfolio business, Guarding Fresh, was concluded one week later. Also, Guarding Fresh has secured a $40,000 grant for its product R&D.
📝 We signed our Venture Agreement with 3 additional teams, an important step towards launching as co-founders in the coming weeks.
We are making great strides in building 4 Cohort businesses:
🌽 Eden Seeds, a farmer-owned indigenous seed company.
🌱 EcoLogic, solving the issue of last mile distribution for organic inputs.
☣️ Guarding Fresh, developing a natural fungicide to replace cancer-causing agro-chemicals.
🤝🏾 Regen Harvests, paying crop advance payments to ease quality sourcing of grains for agro-processors.
Over the past 10 months these 4 teams have been testing their business models and validating assumptions in real life: learning by doing, learning by selling, as we say. They made important progress in fine-tuning their offering, listening to more customers, figuring out team dynamics, understanding unit economics, designing ownership structures and financial plans. In short, getting ready for the future and their business growth to deliver impact at scale.
The Rootical Founders-in-Residence and team at the November Founders Gathering.
On top of that, we’re exploring two additional business opportunities internally:
A landscape regeneration business model to provide access to water, energy and markets to clusters of farmers, based on permaculture, syntropic agroforestry, and product-as-a-service models.
It’s not the Cow it’s the How: led by a dedicated, external co-founder, we’re looking into business solutions to promote regenerative and holistic grazing management in Uganda’s cattle corridor.
We are excited about a signed partnership agreement with Danish Church Aid in Uganda to test and develop the landscape business with their support and 1000 agroecological farmers in the Teso region.
About Being Steward-Owned
To re-design the food system, we also need to re-think ownership. To avoid mission drift and work with truly impact-aligned investors, we need to talk about how our agri-food companies of the future are financed, managed and owned. When applying the principles of agroecology and organic agriculture — Health, Ecology, Fairness, Care — to business ownership, we naturally end up with steward ownership.
Here is what this means to us:
✊🏾 Rootical and the businesses we build are now profit-for-purpose companies with their mission locked into their legal DNA, forever.
💸 We can work with impact-aligned investors and pay fair-share returns for all.
🚀 The active stewards, involved in the day-to-day pursuit of the company's purpose, will always be at the steering wheel.
🤑 Independence: Rootical can never be speculatively sold.
💪🏾 Our aim is for Rootical to become fully Ugandan-owned over time, led by its employees and the Rootical venture founders that emerge successfully — they are best placed to continue steering Rootical towards its purpose.
🎯 Purpose lock: in terms of governance a lot has to be decided still, over the coming years, but one thing cannot be undone: we trusted an external board of golden shareholders to be our mission guardians, Josephine Akia, Ruth Nabaggala, Fabio Leippert, and Bart van der Zande.
🔐 We cannot reverse our steward-ownership set-up. They hold veto rights over all important decisions regarding our governance, financial and legal DNA.
In the words of Innocent Ociti (EcoLogic co-founder):
"The mission must always take precedence over anything else, apart from the Founder's well-being."
Or as Okello John (Guarding Fresh) added:
"Making money and the impact go hand-in-hand, we have our (steward) ownership structure to make sure of that."
The Rootical team: Elivis (Studio Officer), Speci (Communication intern), Isaac (Venture Builder), Ruth (Talent Manager) and Hannes (Managing Director).
Rootical goes International
We have been participating and presenting Rootical in a series of international events:
In September, Elivis and Hannes joined the AFSA Tripartite event themed “Empowering Agroecological Entrepreneurs, Celebrating African Food Heritage, and Building Resilient Markets” in Zimbabwe.
In October, our venture builder, Isaac, presented our model at the highest stage of food and agroecology, during the FAO events around World Food Day and the World Food Forum.
Hannes was invited to the #Agrovisiones podcast of FAO Latin America.
In December, Hannes joined the Organic World Congress hosted by IFOAM - Organics International and Nanhua University in Taiwan. He went in a bid to put Agroecology Enterprise development on the agenda of this 3-yearly gathering of the global organic movement.
We look forward to building further on the partnerships that will emerge from the conversations had at these important events.
Finally, here are some remarkable figures to highlight the combined progress with our partners:
🌍 Together with Fresh Ventures Studio (EU) and Overstory Ventures (US), we have mobilised over $3 million to power our Regenerative Studio model and are building 15+ businesses across 3 continents.
🚀 We are now going into the 6th cohort of building Regenerative agri-food businesses that are designed to transform the food system.
🌐 We are already working hard to add 2 new studios to our family by the end of 2025: in a second East-African Country and in Indonesia. More about that next year!
