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KEY POINTS
- Investors are shifting capital away from asset-light farm-gate marketplace apps toward cold chain infrastructure.
- Twiga Foods raised roughly $185 million and entered administration, while cold chain deals attracted significant new funding in 2025 and 2026.
- Africa’s cold chain logistics market was valued at $11.78 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $17.54 billion by 2030.
For a decade, Twiga Foods was the story African agritech told itself. A Kenyan startup connecting smallholder banana farmers to Nairobi street vendors through an app.
Goldman Sachs led a $30 million Series B in 2019. Creadev followed with a $50 million Series C in late 2021. The company eventually raised roughly $185 million from investors including the IFC and TLcom. In 2026, Twiga entered administration.
The post-mortem has been brutal. Impact investor Luni Libes wrote that Twiga was “the poster child for how not to invest in food and agriculture in Africa, wasting $185 million and causing investors like Goldman Sachs, IFC, DFC, and many others to think food/ag businesses are bad investments”.
Twiga’s core problem was not the app. It was the physics underneath the app. Moving fresh produce from thousands of small farms to thousands of small kiosks means paying for collection, warehouses, trucks, spoilage, and customer credit, on goods that sell for very little.
The app was the visible layer. The cost was in the cold chain staging and routing software that added overheads exceeding the gross margin available between farm-gate and vendor.
Twiga is not alone. In October 2026, Moroccan agritech startup YoLa Fresh ceased operations less than three years after launch. It had raised $9 million, served over 1,000 retail customers, and reported an 85 percent retention rate. It could not raise the growth capital it needed to continue.
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The pattern is clear. Early-stage capital is often available. Larger growth rounds are harder to secure. And the companies that fail are the ones that scaled an asset-light model without proving the unit economics worked.
Did you know?
Nigeria recorded between ₦3.5 trillion and ₦5 trillion in post-harvest losses in 2025, according to the Organisation for Technology Advancement of Cold Chain in West Africa (OTACCWA). That is an estimated 30 to 40 million metric tonnes of food lost across major value chains.
The country has fewer than 1,000 cold trucks. It needs 25,000 to transport over 11 million metric tonnes of perishable foods annually. That gap is not a problem. It is an investment thesis.
The numbers tell the story: capital is moving into assets
The shift is not anecdotal. It shows up in the data. African agtech startups raised $169 million in 2025. For the first time, the largest share of that money did not go to apps. Waste management attracted $50.5 million, and energy and water drew $22.2 million. Investors are no longer just funding software. They are funding solar irrigation, cold storage, and physical infrastructure.
“Capital is finally moving downstream of production into assets: water, energy, waste, cold chains,” wrote Ag Safari in its analysis of the year’s funding. “That’s not a trend, it’s a correction”.
The correction is being driven by what investors are trying to avoid. Post-harvest loss, asset fragility, and climate volatility are the failures that capital now wants to solve, not the promise of a marketplace app that takes a commission on a tomato that spoils before it arrives.
Sahel Capital put its first cheque into cold chain, not an app
Sahel Capital, a private investor focused on sub-Saharan agribusiness, reached a $29 million first close for its Sahel Capital Agribusiness Fund II (SCAF II) in December 2025. The fund is targeting a final close of $75 million.
The fund’s first investment in Nigeria was not a farm-gate platform. It was Delifrost Caterers Limited, a company operating cold storage facilities, refrigerated trucks, and food distribution under cold chain management.
SCAF II said it will achieve its impact goals through investments in cold chain logistics, efficient processing, and a reduction in post-harvest losses.
“The first close of SCAF II, along with our first investment, demonstrate the strong investor confidence in our strategy,” said Mezuo Nwuneli, managing partner of Sahel Capital.
The fund’s thesis is not complicated. It is backing the infrastructure that makes the food supply chain work, not the interface that sits on top of it.
Mirova bets $19 million on a Kenyan cold storage facility
In January 2026, Mirova, an affiliate of Natixis Investment Managers, invested $19 million in Cold Solutions Kiambu, a Kenyan company operating temperature-controlled cold storage and logistics.
The facility sits in Tatu City and holds around 15,000 pallet positions. It serves the agricultural and pharmaceutical sectors. It uses high-efficiency refrigeration, ammonia-based refrigerants, and rooftop solar panels covering about 30 percent of its energy needs.
“This financing exemplifies how the Mirova Gigaton Fund aims to accelerate transformative climate solutions in emerging markets,” said John Kimotho, Mirova Kenya’s investment director. “By backing Cold Solutions Kiambu, we’re scaling clean-powered, climate-aligned, and operationally resilient cold chain infrastructure, critical for food security and health systems across East Africa”.
The investment is climate finance, but it is also cold chain finance. The two categories are converging because food loss is a climate problem and a commercial one.
SokoFresh secured concessional debt, not equity
In April 2026, Kenyan agritech firm SokoFresh secured KSh 65 million ($500,000) in concessional debt financing from the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), under a food systems investment vehicle backed by the Bayer Foundation.
SokoFresh provides solar-powered cold storage and aggregation services for smallholder farmers. The four-year local currency loan will support expansion across Kenya’s horticultural and staple crop value chains, with projections of reaching roughly 5,000 smallholder farmers annually.
The deal structure matters. It is performance-linked. Repayment conditions are tied to operational milestones, including expanded farmer reach and efficiency targets in cold storage utilisation.
It also reflects a broader shift in development finance. Agencies are moving away from grant-based support toward catalytic lending designed to attract private capital.
For cold chain companies, that is good news. The capital is patient, it is structured, and it is willing to absorb early-stage risk in markets where commercial lenders have been reluctant to lend.
The market is large and growing
Africa’s cold chain logistics market was estimated at $11.78 billion in 2025. It is projected to reach $17.54 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual rate of 8.28 percent.
The food cold chain segment alone was valued at $6.84 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow at around 8.4 percent through 2035.
Those are not speculative numbers from a pitch deck. They are market estimates from research firms tracking the sector.
The demand is being driven by urbanisation, changing diets, the growth of modern retail, and the simple fact that food spoils when it is not kept cold.
Why the cold chain is harder to kill than an app
The farm-gate app model failed for a structural reason. It captured a thin margin on a transaction while bearing the cost of logistics, spoilage, and credit. When the funding environment tightened, there was no cushion.
Cold chain infrastructure is different. It is capital-intensive, which makes it harder to build. But it is also a hard asset. A cold room in Kano or a refrigerated truck in Kiambu has value beyond the software that manages it.
Investors are not abandoning agritech. They are abandoning a model that treated physical supply chains like asset-light software.
“The trend now is to have much more patient capital and more cashflow-based businesses,” said Sewu-Steve Tawia, managing director at Asime Partners. “What we are seeing is the tail end of business models that were funded based on the founders’ ability to raise capital rather than the actual ability to operate in an environment that is very challenging”.
Patient capital and cashflow-based businesses. That describes cold chain better than it describes a marketplace app.
What This Means for Founders
The message to founders is not that apps are worthless. The message is that the app is not the business. The business is the supply chain the app sits on.
Founders building in African agritech should ask a harder question than whether their product connects farmers to buyers. They should ask whether the food actually survives the journey.
Investors have already started asking that question. The capital is moving to the cold room, the refrigerated truck, and the solar-powered storage unit. The founders who follow it will find a more patient, more durable kind of money.
The farm-gate app era is not ending because the idea was bad. It is ending because the economics were brutal and the funding environment stopped forgiving them.
Twiga raised $185 million and entered administration. YoLa Fresh raised $9 million and shut down. Meanwhile, Sahel Capital, Mirova, UNCDF, and others are putting money into cold storage and refrigerated logistics.
Africa’s cold chain market is worth $11.78 billion and growing. Nigeria alone loses ₦3.5 trillion to ₦5 trillion in post-harvest losses every year.
The investors have seen the numbers. They are not betting on the app anymore. They are betting on the cold.
