Bridge Merchant Uses Aladinn Agro to Link Farmers, Buyers

In Short: Bridge Merchant Supply Chain Model In Nigeria

Bridge Merchant is a Nigerian agri-tech startup that links smallholder farmers to processors, manufacturers and other institutional buyers. It combines a rural agent network, storage infrastructure and its technology platform, Aladinn Agro.

What Happened: How Bridge Merchant Runs Aladinn Agro

Founded in 2020 by CEO Chinwendu Nweke, Bridge Merchant started as an agricultural trading and aggregation business. It later evolved into a tech-enabled supply chain company.

The company is led by a four-person founding team. It has six core employees and a network of more than 1,300 rural agents, around 65 per cent of whom are women.

Bridge Merchant uses Aladinn Agro with its field network to onboard and verify farmers, map farms, aggregate produce, manage quality and traceability, and coordinate logistics. Traceability means being able to track where a commodity came from and how it moved through the chain.

The startup mainly works with staple commodities such as maize, soybeans, paddy rice, sorghum, millet and beans. It also works on selected export and agricultural by-product value chains.

Nweke said Bridge Merchant was created after seeing farmers lose value because “the infrastructure between production and the market was fragmented.” He also said processors and large buyers struggle to source consistent volumes of traceable, quality-controlled commodities from thousands of fragmented smallholders.

Bridge Merchant has engaged more than 10,000 farmers and aggregated more than 20,000 tonnes of agricultural commodities to date. It has access to around 3,000 tonnes of partner warehousing capacity and has deployed three solar-powered storage units in northern Nigeria.

The company earns most of its revenue from commodity aggregation and trade, taking a margin when it acts as principal. For larger transactions it facilitates without taking ownership, it earns commissions of between two and five per cent.

Why It Matters: Bridging Physical Gaps, Not Just Digital Ones

Bridge Merchant says competition comes from agricultural marketplaces, aggregators, commodity traders and supply chain technology companies. Nweke said its difference is integrating both the digital and physical parts of the supply chain.

He said the hardest part is building a system that works reliably in rural communities where connectivity, storage, logistics and trust are major constraints.