Twiga Foods, a Kenyan agritech startup has raised $30 million series b funding led by investment bank Goldman Sachs. Twiga Foods financed $6.25 million of the funding in convertible debt and $23.75 million in equity. IFC, TLcom Capital, and Creadev joined Goldman in the investment.
Twiga will use the funds to establish a distribution centre in Nairobi and deepen its conversion to offering supply chain services for both agricultural and FMCG products.
The Nairobi based firm will also invest in expanding into more cities in Kenya, including Mombasa. Twiga is also targeting Pan-African expansion by the third quarter of 2020.
“We’re working on French West Africa…we see significant opportunity in those markets,” Twiga CEO Peter Njonjo said. The company will name the new country (or countries) in the following year, he added.
Twiga’s financing comes 11 months after a $10 million raise and announcement it would create additional revenue streams by moving into B2B supply chain for FMCG and other consumer products.
Twiga Foods has moved quickly on diversifying its supply-chain product mix. “We’re not just doing fruits and vegetables…I’d say we’re at 50/50 now between FMCG and fresh,” said Njonjo.
“We’ve pivoted a bit as a company…we see our purpose as an organization around what I would call aggregating the informal retail, then using technology, and then using that buying power to essentially provide lower, better cost goods across cities,” he said.
Twiga Foods was co-founded by Peter Njonjo and Grant Brooke in Nairobi in 2014 and serves around 3,000 outlets a day with produce through a network of 17,000 farmers and 8,000 vendors. Parties can coordinate goods exchanges via mobile app using M-Pesa mobile money for payment.
