👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – IPO gold rush, fintech gridlock

Twiga Foods, the Kenyan business-to-business (B2B) commerce startup, has spent the last three years cutting jobs, changing its business model, acquiring distributors, and reshuffling its corporate structure in a desperate attempt to make its business cheaper to run. It still wasn’t enough. 

What happened? According to a September 11 gazette notice, GT Flow Limited, the company’s legal entity formerly known as Twiga Foods One Limited, entered administration on August 17. Mohamed Mohamed, a court-appointed statutory administrator, has now assumed control of Twiga’s businesses and assets.

Putting a business into administration effectively means ceding control to an independent evaluator or company, whose sole job is to do one of two things: try to steer the company back into operations again, and when it cannot, find a way to responsibly shut it down so investors do not end up walking away with their tails between their legs.

Twiga’s creditors have also been asked to submit their claims within 30 days. 

Explain like I’m new here: Twiga launched in 2014 with the idea that it could fix the mess in Kenya’s food supply chain by using technology to connect farmers and manufacturers directly to the small shops and kiosks. The idea attracted serious money. Twiga raised about $185.4 million, including a $50 million Series C in 2021 and a $35 million convertible bond in 2023. 

So, what was the problem? Unlike money, food is physical. Someone still has to buy it, store it, move it, pay suppliers, manage warehouses, and get it to retailers. Twiga had built farms, warehouses, delivery fleets, and other pieces of that supply chain, making the business expensive and more complicated. By 2023, it was cutting jobs and moving away from some of its in-house infrastructure. Founder Peter Njonjo left as CEO and later exited the board in 2024.

Then Twiga tried to become lighter: In 2025, it acquired controlling stakes in three fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) distributors—Jumra, Sojpar and Raisons—giving it eight existing distribution centres across Kenya. It also created a new holding structure, internally called newco, to centralise procurement, logistics, and technology. 

But the problems persisted. However, that newco restructuring yielded little positive change. In August 2023, Twiga laid off about 300 employees. By 2025, it was on its last leg, when it paused operations in Nairobi for two months.

Bigger than Twiga: Across Africa, B2B commerce startups learned that the margins are thin and customers are price-sensitive. MarketForce, another Kenyan B2B commerce startup, eventually shut down its RejaReja business in 2024 after downsizing operations. MarketForce had raised $42.5 million. 

Kenya’s Wasoko and Egypt’s MaxAB took a different escape route to escape the harsh climate; they merged, creating what the founders called a “merger of equals” in a year when the e-commerce sector was starved of consolidation deals. Before that deal, both companies had cut staff, exited markets, and closed hubs.

What’s the moral lesson? Technology can digitise physical supply chains, especially in local and cross-border commerce. We’ve seen this countless times. But it doesn’t mean that the physical infrastructure needed to make it work disappears with tech. That infrastructure is what costs money to maintain. 

Twiga played for years and became one of Kenya’s most-funded, celebrated e-commerce startups. But soon—applying a bit of rational optimism—Twiga could be no more. Yet, it was quite a run.