Sesi Technologies is the only Ghanaian company on Qualcomm's 2026 Make in Africa shortlist.
The Kumasi-based agritech firm joins nine other early-stage hardware startups on the fourth edition of the mentorship programme, selected from more than 1,200 applications across 45 African countries.
The Qualcomm project is an AI-powered field device that enables early cocoa quality assessment and transparent supply chains. That is the official description on the Qualcomm page. In plainer terms: a handheld tool a licensed buying company agent can use to grade beans on the spot against the variables that determine farm gate price, replacing the sample-to-lab loop the current COCOBOD quality system still runs on.
Sesi Technologies is Isaac Sesi's company.
He started it in March 2018 out of KNUST, where he was a research engineer, and built the first product by redesigning a US Department of Agriculture grain moisture meter for local conditions. That became GrainMate. FarmSense, an AI-layered on-farm soil testing service, followed. Sesi was named in MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 list in 2019.
The cocoa quality tool is the most directly consequential product on the Qualcomm cohort's agenda for anyone watching the Ghana cocoa value chain.
Ghana has been losing ground to Côte d'Ivoire on farm gate price realisation for twenty years. Quality disputes at the point of purchase, and the resulting side-selling to Ivorian buyers across the border, is one of the documented reasons.
COCOBOD has piloted quality control programmes at least three times since 2015 without producing a device deployed at buying company scale. A working, affordable grading tool would be the first instance.
The other nine startups in the 2026 cohort, from the Qualcomm listing:
Amperra Charging Company (Namibia): AI-driven, grid-adaptive smart EV charging platform
Anatsor (Nigeria): integrated digital poultry management system
D-Olivette Labs (Nigeria): bio-intelligence platform for sustainable agricultural production
Mindora Corporation (Zimbabwe): braille keyboard solution for visually impaired users
MVUTU / GreenBox (Republic of Congo): solar-powered IoT cold storage for smallholder farmers
QualiKeeper Investments (Zambia): AIoT livestock monitoring for low-connectivity rural environments
SafeSip (Tanzania): smart drinking water access and monitoring for urban and peri-urban areas
TWave (Uganda): automated solar-powered fish feeding for aquaculture
Zerobionic (Kenya): assistive robotics for persons with disabilities
Of all the ten companies from across eight countries, seven of them are in agriculture or agriculture-adjacent hardware.
The Qualcomm programme is equity-free. Participants receive technical mentorship on Arduino's AI prototyping platform, engineering consultations, intellectual property training through L2Pro Africa, and up to $5,000 reimbursement for patent filing costs.
Every company that finishes the cycle gets a $5,000 completion stipend. One startup is selected at the end of the programme for a Social Impact Fund grant through Qualcomm for Good.
The Qualcomm mentorship is not the first institutional backing Sesi Technologies has carried, but it is the first international corporate engagement of this kind to reach a Ghanaian hardware startup on the cohort. Now for Isaac Sesi's team over the next nine months, they will have to see if the cocoa device reaches a working pre-production build by the time the programme closes, and whether any of the country's licensed buying companies agree to pilot it at the farm gate.
