Until recently, the wholesale purchase or sale of grains meant countless meetings, phone calls, and emails. The business of getting one’s stockpiles of wheat, corn, or other farming commodities on the market depends explicitly on the personal relationships between traders and farmers. Agriniser, an up-and-running digital marketplace, aims to bring grain buyers and sellers together, improving business opportunities, trust, and security for all parties along the grain chain.
The challenge
The traditional way of doing business via one’s personal network resulted in many inefficiencies like protracted negotiations, suboptimal pricing, and limited market access, to name a few. Founded in 2016 by former commodity traders within the grains and energy industry in the UK, Agriniser tackles these issues by aiming for a level playing field with an intuitive interface for buyers and sellers alike.
One of the big challenges was to adapt the user flow to farmers across all ages and convince them to perform their trading activities via Agriniser. Another was to unlock the platform for users outside Bulgaria, the initial launching market, and, as a function of this, build trust among an international user base.
Our solution
To boost Agriniser’s features and user experience, ITIDO joined the game with offering a complete solution: one of our founders (Christo Stoyanov) became a CTO of Agriniser, we built a dedicated team with solid experience in Product development, UX/UI, DevOps, Software Architecture and Testing. Among the major improvements to the platform, we:
- helped Agriniser to scale their platform in a way that could easy meet other markets requirements
- did a complete platform refactoring by following the best software standards, using modern technical stack/frameworks
- introduced precise geolocations with intuitive UI;
- enabled extended geographic coverage to Romania and other European markets;
- improved platform performance and security
- migrated the CI/CD infrastructure from a local host to a powerful cloud solution, thus ensuring the platform’s security and further scalability.
Furthermore, we are working to integrate price data from the world’s leading commodity exchanges – CBOT and MATIF. We implement upgrades and develop features by applying the Scrum approach while keeping an eye on trending user needs via regular surveys and direct anonymized observations via virtual analytics tools.
Agriniser now sets the standard for buying and selling agricultural commodities in the digital age and ITIDO is proud to be part of its success.
At Agriniser, we deeply believe in strong and long-lasting partnerships. ITIDO is a great example of it. I am glad that thanks to their professional approach, we have built an amazing platform that makes the grain marketing process more efficient
Kristian Ivanov, Founder and CEO of Agriniser
Technologies we used
- React
- NodeJS
- AWS services
- Kubernetes
- Nginx
- Microservice architecture
- MySQL
- OpenStreetMap
- Nominatim
- Strype API
- Barchart API
The platform in numbers
- 1600+ registered users
- 620k+ hectares of land registered, representing 22% of the Bulgarian market
- 43% increase in published offers, 2019 to 2020
- 37% increase in closed deals, 2019 to 2020