hiveonline

hiveonline (Hiveonline ApS) is a Copenhagen-based company building mobile digital financial infrastructure for the informal rural economy in sub-Saharan Africa. Its platform records the savings, lending, trade and production activity of smallholder farmers and community groups on a distributed ledger, creating a verifiable digital transaction history and KYC record for people who lack formal identification or paper credit histories. The company frames this as converting community trust into financial history that banks, microfinance institutions and other lenders can use to underwrite previously "invisible" borrowers.

The platform is modular and API-first, intended to integrate with existing banking systems, mobile money networks and supply chain logistics. Two contextual applications are offered: MyCoop, for farming cooperatives, covering community membership, production plans, harvest aggregation, input and offtake marketplaces, integrated payments and learning modules; and a VSLA application that digitises Village Savings and Loan Associations, replacing paper ledgers with digital records of savings, internal loans, welfare and fines, meeting attendance and cash-out workflows. The company positions its solutions across the full agricultural lifecycle, spanning inputs and machinery, agronomic knowledge and advisory, market linkages and pricing, and access to finance and investment.

Founding story

Sofie Blakstad founded hiveonline and serves as CIO, having previously held senior technology development, architecture, infrastructure and business transformation roles across eight major international banks in more than 60 countries, delivering core banking and payment systems and leading transformation of Citigroup's technology and retail operations. Matt Mims is co-founder and CEO, with a background in investment, retail and wealth banking and in advising fintech startups since 2013.

Business model

hiveonline supplies digital financial and market-access infrastructure to actors in the rural agricultural ecosystem, including smallholder farmer communities and cooperatives, financial services providers seeking wider digital distribution, agribusinesses trading directly with farmer communities, and NGOs running financial inclusion and market access programmes. The platform is offered for integration into existing banking, mobile money and supply chain systems.

Traction

The company reports reaching more than 75,000 smallholder farmers, supporting value chains for 52 crops, and holding regulatory approval from the Central Bank of Mozambique to facilitate third-party lending and financial inclusion. Over 75,000 users were migrated to its Hedera-based platform. In 2020 the European Commission's #DLT4Good scanning recorded the project at demo stage.