Josephat Adelard Urassa, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of the Tanzanian agritech startup MazaoHub, has died, the company announced. No cause of death or further details on the circumstances have been made public.

MazaoHub described Urassa as central to the company’s engineering and product work, crediting him with helping to build the systems underpinning its soil-testing and farm-advisory platform. In a statement, the company said it was announcing his death “with profound sorrow” and called him “a visionary, innovator, mentor, and an important part of the MazaoHub family.”

Before co-founding MazaoHub, Urassa served as Co-Founder and Chief Executive of UjuziNet Group, a Tanzanian technology company offering enterprise resource planning software for businesses in agriculture, education, and digital marketing. He also worked on the development of Tanzania’s central university admission system, an engineering project that brought him into contact with Geophrey Tenganamba, who would later become his MazaoHub co-founder.

Colleagues described Urassa as a software engineer with more than a decade of experience spanning artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, enterprise software, farm management systems, and soil intelligence. He was also known as a mentor to young entrepreneurs and a regular speaker at technology industry events.

MazaoHub, which styles itself as an “agricultural intelligence engine” for African smallholder farmers, recently closed a rare oversubscribed $2 million pre-seed funding round to expand a model that combines low-cost soil-testing kits, an online and offline software platform, and a network of physical “Farm Clinics” run in partnership with local agro-vet shops. The round drew equity investment led by Catalyst Fund, with participation from Nordic Impact Fund, Mercy Corps Ventures, the Elea Foundation, Impacc, and DOB Equity, alongside non-dilutive capital from the Livelihood Impact Fund.

Speaking to Launch Base Africa before Urassa’s death, Tenganamba described their partnership in personal terms, saying the two were “truly like brothers, united in this mission” of bringing what he called the “MazaoHub signature” of higher productivity to farms across Tanzania. He credited Urassa’s engineering background, developed in part through work on the university admission system, as foundational to the technical platform MazaoHub farmers now use.

In its statement, MazaoHub said it would remember Urassa “through the systems he helped build, the people he inspired, the young innovators he mentored, and the farmers whose lives will continue to be transformed through MazaoHub,” adding that his vision would “live on in every farmer we serve, every solution we build, and every step we take toward the future he believed in.”