Bangladeshi agritech startup iFarmer has won the Innovation for Development Award from the OPEC Fund for International Development, receiving US$250K at the organisation's Development Forum in Vienna on June 23. 

The company is the only Bangladeshi organisation among this year's recipients—and the first private-sector startup from Bangladesh to receive the honour, presented at Vienna's Hofburg Palace as part of the Fund's 50th anniversary celebrations.

Founded in 2019, iFarmer operates a full-stack agritech platform that connects smallholder farmers to embedded financing, agricultural inputs, advisory services, and direct market linkages. Its input distribution network, KriShop, serves over 24,000 agricultural retailers across Bangladesh. Since founding, the company has reached more than 300,000 farmers nationwide.

"Such recognitions help us validate that we are doing something noble, taking a different approach in helping the agriculture sector be more efficient and relevant," said Fahad Ifaz, Co-founder and CEO of iFarmer. "For the ecosystem, the message is that we have more to do—look at a problem and solve it the best and most innovative way possible. Do not need to just copy other models."

Ifaz also pointed to a broader lesson for founders: "Not every investor is now interested in copy-paste models. They look for something noble along with evidence that the idea or the model works. We need to look at global business models and think of tweaking it for our market relevance, but our market relevance also means that there are other emerging economies in the world where the model could also work. Emerging market business models vs developed economy business models are different. We need to acknowledge that."

The OPEC Fund for International Development is a multilateral development finance institution that channels financing from its member countries toward development projects across the Global South.

The recognition comes two months after iFarmer secured US$1.5Mn in working capital financing from Symbiotics, a Switzerland-based impact investing platform, and follows a US$2.1Mn Pre-Series A in 2022 led by IDLC Venture Capital Fund. The company has drawn consistent interest from international impact investors since its founding.