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Kenyan aquaculture tech startup Victory Farms raises $5M funding for expansion.

Victory Farms, a tilapia fish aquaculture startup with hatcheries, nursery ponds, and deep-water cages, has raised $5 million in new capital.

Ed Brakeman, a senior managing director at Bain Capital, and Hans den Bieman, the founder and former CEO of Mowi, one of the world’s largest salmon companies, led the investment.

Following seven internal angel rounds from the same collection of equity–and debt investors (it received $40 million in debt last year), this is the startup’s first institutional investment. The funding will help the Kenyan enterprise expand into Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Tanzania.

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Victory Farms was founded in 2015 by Joseph Rehmann. After completing his MBA program, he worked in Ghana for three months on an aquaculture project, which led to a three-year role as CFO of an Accra-based farm.

Rehmann and his longtime business partner Steve Moran set out to explore Lake Victoria and do feasibility studies on how they may utilize technology to disrupt the country’s cold chain markets in 2015.

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They came to the conclusion that there was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reconstruct the fish value chain from the ground up. Victory Farms was founded with an angel round and launched in mid-2016 to address a market with a $1.5 billion fish deficit.

According to Victory Farm, technology is being utilized to increase fish production while also cutting prices for the hundreds of market women who buy fish in small batches to cook and sell at local food markets.

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They run a tech-enabled platform, according to Rehmann, and have scaled 2x quicker than any other African fish firm. Victory Farm has constructed the most effective service in the world utilizing data, at half the cost of the current worldwide leader.

The company sells to Africans in the mass market with a cutting-edge RTM cold chain that uses predictive data to deliver fish to thousands of market women every day across Kenya with less than 1% spoilage.

Over 15,000 market women visit the startup’s 54 retail shops to buy fish, and they don’t require electricity or ice.

Victory Farms claims to have one of the highest margin structures in the fishing industry globally due to its technology. The company recorded a 130% CAGR between 2017 to 2021. Maintaining this growth rate can exude utmost confidence. In Victory Farms’ case, Rehmann believes there are no significant competitors to the company — which also has a processing plant and distribution network — in Kenya and the larger East African region.

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Weddy Thuranira
Weddy Thuranira
Weddy profiles new startups and innovators across Africa and announces funding rounds, mergers, acquisitions and startup partnerships across Africa. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya. Reach her and the entire news desk at [email protected]

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