Twiga Foods, Kenyan B2B food distribution firm, has closed a $50 million Series C funding to digitise food distribution across Africa.
The B2B food distribution company financed $6.25 million of the funding in debt and $23.75 million in equity, classified as a Series B round. IFC, TLcom Capital and Creadev joined Goldman on the VC side.
This takes the total funding raised by the Kenyan agritech startup to over $100 million in both debt and equity financing rounds.
Twiga will use the funds to establish a distribution center in Nairobi and deepen its conversion to offering supply chain services for both agricultural and FMCG products.
The Nairobi-based company will invest in expanding into more cities in Kenya, including Mombasa. Twiga is also targeting Pan-African expansion by third quarter 2020.
Unlike when it started, Twiga focused primarily on agricultural goods and connecting more efficiently to marketplaces the produce of farmers.
However, it has diversified its supply-chain product mix. The company said it is now between FMCG and fresh foods.
“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,” Peter Njonjo, Twiga Foods CEO said.
Co-founded in 2014 by Peter Njonjo and Grant Brooke, Twiga Foods 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. The company has reduced typical post-harvest losses in Kenya from 30% to 4% for produce brought to market on the Twiga network.
