Kenya’s aquaculture startup, Victory Farms raises $5M to expand into three new markets in Africa
Kenyan’s aquaculture tech startup, Victory Farms which deals in tilapia fish and run hatcheries, nursery ponds, and deep-water cages, announced today that it had raised $5 million in Ed Brakeman, a senior managing director at Bain Capital, and Hans den Bieman, founder and ex-CEO of Mowi-led investment round.
This funding is the startup’s first investment since it secured $40 million in debt funding last year. The fund will be used to scale into Rwanda, DRC, and Tanzania.
Before the launch of Victory Farm in 2015, Joseph Rehmann, with his longtime business partner, Steve Moran, explored Lake Victoria and performed some feasibility studies on how they could use technology to disrupt the country’s cold chain markets.
Rehmann said in a mail to TechCrunch, “We run a tech-enabled platform and have scaled 2x faster than any other African fish company. And using data, we have built the most efficient operation globally at half the CAPEX of a current global leader.”
“We sell to mass market Africans via a high innovative RTM cold chain which uses predictive data to push fish to thousands of market ladies every day all across Kenya with less than 1% spoilage,” he added.
The startup currently operates in over 54 retail locations where over 15,000 market women go to buy fish, and according to Rehmann, they use neither electricity nor ice.
“We use vertical integration to drive a more robust data set from end to end, which allows us to innovate and create more cost-effective solutions through our systems and the power of data to deliver a better, fresher product to more consumers.”
Victory Farms claims to have one of the highest margin structures in the fishing industry globally due to its technology. As a result, the company recorded a 130% CAGR from 2017 – to 2021.
The startup also runs a processing plant and distribution network in Kenya and the larger East African region. Rehmann believes there are no significant competitors to the startup in the industry.
“We’re growing so much faster than them (the competition) that we don’t see this as a competitive playing field. The real competitor for us is hunger and consumers not being able to have an affordable protein option.”
According to Rehmann, in as much as Victory Farms is profit and growth-oriented, it is worthy of note that the startup is working toward becoming the world’s most sustainable tilapia platform. “We’ve got several initiatives underway and planned to build the world’s first carbon-negative fish platform. And I think it’s fascinating because we’ve got a lot of tangible and measurable dimensions built into the business to achieve that,” the CEO hinted.