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KEY POINTS
- Debt and non-equity instruments overtook equity as the majority of African agritech funding in 2025, according to Briter.
- SunCulture’s $10 million receivables securitisation stands out as the most replicable model, turning farmer repayments into institutional capital.
- Apollo Agriculture, Victory Farms, Tomato Jos, and Complete Farmer show debt working across lending, aquaculture, processing, and farmer services.
For the first time, African agritech startups raised more money through debt, grants, and blended finance than through equity. The shift is not a retreat from ambition. It is a correction toward the way agritech businesses actually work.
African agritech has spent a decade chasing venture capital. The logic was simple. Raise equity, grow fast, worry about profitability later. That logic has broken.
According to the State of Agtech Investment in Africa 2025 report by Briter, equity is no longer the dominant source of capital in African agritech. In 2025, startups in the sector raised less than $170 million. For the first time, equity accounted for less than half of total funding.
Equity funding fell from roughly $328 million in 2022 to about $80 million in 2025. Total funding dropped nearly 20 percent year-on-year, from over $200 million in 2024 to under $170 million. The money did not disappear. It changed form.
Debt, concessional funding, and hybrid models now make up the majority of capital deployed in African agritech. Commercial investors are re-entering, but they are not leading large equity rounds. They are participating through structured deals, often alongside development finance institutions that provide risk-sharing.
This is not a temporary adjustment. It is a structural correction. Agritech operations are asset-heavy. They require working capital for irrigation systems, cold storage, processing equipment, and farmer credit. Equity is poorly suited to financing a solar pump that a farmer will repay over three years. Debt is built for that job. Briter’s data shows African agritech funding peaked at about $483 million in 2022. It fell to $194 million in 2023, recovered slightly to $206.9 million in 2024, and declined again to $168.1 million in 2025. The decline is real. But the composition of what remains has changed completely.
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The standout deal: SunCulture’s $10 million securitisation
Several companies have used debt well. One stands out on structure, scale, and replicability.In September 2026, SunCulture closed a $10 million securitisation of receivables linked to solar irrigation systems. The deal was structured with Mirova’s Gigaton Fund and Kaleidofin.
A securitisation works like this. SunCulture sells solar irrigation systems to farmers on a pay-as-you-grow model. Farmers repay over time. Instead of waiting years to collect those repayments, SunCulture bundles them into a financial instrument and sells them to institutional investors. It gets cash today and uses that cash to finance more farmers.
Read Also: Top Funding Rounds in African Agritech 2025
The press release describes the transaction as “a landmark” designed to “mobilise institutional capital for climate-smart agriculture in Africa and establish a replicable financing model for distributed productive-use energy assets”.
That phrase matters. Replicable. SunCulture did not just solve its own working-capital problem. It created a template that other asset-heavy agritech companies can follow.
SunCulture has deployed nearly 40,000 solar irrigation systems and reports income gains of up to ten times for farmers. Those impact figures are company-reported. But the financing structure is not an impact claim. It is a capital-markets transaction with named institutional counterparties.
Why SunCulture wins the comparison:
- Structure innovation. A securitisation of farmer receivables is rarer and harder to execute than a direct loan.
- Scale. At $10 million, it is the largest debt deal in this cohort.
- Replicability. The model can be copied by cold chain, equipment leasing, and input financing companies.
- Alignment with agritech’s needs. It converts future farmer cash flows into present capital. That is exactly what asset-heavy agritech requires.
- Other companies have raised debt. SunCulture has built a financing mechanism.
Apollo Agriculture: the first securitisation of smallholder loans
Apollo Agriculture deserves close attention because it did something first. In May 2026, Apollo raised KSh 276 million, or about $2.5 million, through a structured finance transaction that converted smallholder farm loans into securities sold to institutional investors. The deal was Kenya’s first private-sector local-currency securitisation in the smallholder agriculture sector.
The transaction covered a pool of 23,839 smallholder farmers, mostly women, with an average loan size of KSh 17,942. It was the first tranche of a programme targeting KSh 2.37 billion in total issuance and more than 130,000 farmers.
The IDH Farmfit Fund acted as anchor investor. FSD Africa supported the deal through legal structuring, regulatory engagement, and investor mobilisation. Kaleidofin structured and enabled the transaction. Eli Pollak, CEO of Apollo Agriculture, described the logic plainly.
“By converting receivables into working capital, we are able to lower our cost of funds and expand access to affordable, local currency financing for farmers”.
Apollo’s deal is smaller than SunCulture’s. But it proved that smallholder loans can be securitised in local currency. That is a breakthrough for a segment that institutional investors have long considered too fragmented and data-poor to finance.
If SunCulture built the model for distributed energy assets, Apollo built the model for farmer credit. Both matter. SunCulture’s edge is scale and the explicit replicability framing.
Victory Farms: $15 million in mezzanine debt for fish
Victory Farms took $15 million in mezzanine debt from AgDevCo in April 2026. The money will scale tilapia production in Kenya and Rwanda, with a target of 30,000 tonnes of fish by 2029.
This is not a startup experimenting with debt. It is a producer using mezzanine financing to build physical capacity. AgDevCo had already invested $4 million in 2021, so this is a follow-on commitment from an investor that knows the business.
Victory Farms does not fit the “replicable structure” test in the way SunCulture does. But it demonstrates that large debt tickets are available for agritech companies with real assets and real revenue.
Tomato Jos: $2 million impact-linked debt for tomato paste
Tomato Jos secured a $2 million impact-linked debt facility from Sabou Capital in May 2026. The facility is denominated in naira and links Sabou Capital’s financial returns to social and economic outcomes achieved by the company.
Tomato Jos sources from more than 3,000 smallholder farmers, 60 percent of whom are women, and manufactures tomato paste for the West African market. The financing is structured around impact targets such as farmer inclusion, women-led sourcing, and rural employment. Borrowing costs fall as the company hits those targets.
Read Also: Why Digital Extension Services Matter for Africa’s Smallholder Farmers
This is debt with a purpose-built incentive structure. It shows that impact-linked lending is becoming a real category, not a donor gimmick.
Complete Farmer: $2.4 million convertible loan from the IFC
Complete Farmer obtained a $2.4 million convertible loan from the International Finance Corporation in September 2026, supported by the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program’s Business Investment Financing Track.
A convertible loan is debt that becomes equity later. It is cheaper than equity today and more patient than a bank loan. The financing will extend Complete Farmer’s support to 240,000 farmers by 2030, alongside $480,000 in IFC advisory support.
Complete Farmer works with over 72,000 farmers and connects them to international buyers including Aldi and Lidl. The convertible structure gives the company room to grow before it has to price its equity.
Why debt fits agritech better than equity
The Briter report explains the shift clearly. Agritech companies operate across logistics, input distribution, and farmer financing. These models demand upfront infrastructure investment and longer payback periods. Traditional venture capital is less suitable for that work.
Equity is good for early-stage innovation. It is patient and it does not require repayment. But equity investors want exponential growth and a exit. A cold room in Kano does not produce exponential growth. It produces steady cash flow.
Debt matches the asset. A solar pump, a refrigerated truck, a processing line, a loan book. These are things that generate predictable repayments. Debt is priced against those repayments.
There is also a discipline argument. Debt forces a company to prove it can service its obligations. Equity allows a company to postpone that proof. In a sector where unit economics have often been fragile, that discipline is valuable. Debt is not a free lunch. It must be repaid. Currency fluctuations can turn a manageable loan into a crushing burden. A naira-denominated facility is safer for a Nigerian company than a dollar loan, but local currency debt is not always available or affordable.
The Briter report notes that non-equity instruments now dominate. That is a healthier mix than pure equity, but it also means more companies are carrying repayment obligations. A downturn in farmer incomes or a bad harvest season can cascade into defaults.
The companies that use debt well are the ones with predictable revenue and strong operational controls. The ones that use it badly are the ones that treat it like equity with a delay. Debt has overtaken equity in African agritech. That is the headline from Briter’s 2025 data, and it is not a temporary blip.
SunCulture’s $10 million securitisation stands out because it created a replicable model, not just a one-off financing. Apollo Agriculture proved smallholder loans can be securitised. Victory Farms showed large debt tickets are available for asset-heavy producers. Tomato Jos and Complete Farmer showed that impact-linked and convertible structures can work for processing and farmer services.
The era of easy equity is over. The era of structured, repayable, asset-backed finance has begun. Founders who understand that shift will find capital where their peers see a closed door.
