Vulisango

South Africa’s roughly 2.5 million smallholder farmers mostly sell at farm-gate prices to informal traders, locked out of formal retail, processing, and export channels by trust, logistics, and payment risk. Vulisango — isiZulu for “open the gate” — matches farmer supply with buyer demand across retailers, processors, wholesalers, exporters, and food-service, and settles every deal in TradeSafe escrow, so a farmer is paid fairly and a buyer receives verified produce.

Farmers interact entirely through WhatsApp and an offline-first PWA built for patchy rural connectivity; buyers work from a full web portal. It’s a live, evolving build, not a pitch deck — lot intake, offline-sync, and escrow settlement are already shipped and QA-approved on the way to a full market-access marketplace.