Yesterday a Kenyan startup called raised $30 million from , including and . According , the company “serves around 3,000 outlets a day with produce through a network of 17,000 farmers and 8,000 vendors.”

Crunchbase News noted that “[t]he Nairobi, Kenya-based marketplace company has raised .”

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

It’s a neat company (mobile payments powering a multi-party food marketplace, expanding into the business-to-business world) with a , but its existence made me ask a question: Who else is raising money in Africa?

It’s bad enough when I’m in Silicon Valley that Sacramento feels far away; there are great companies just starting up and coming of age around the world. I hadn’t heard of Twiga before yesterday. Who else am I missing?

Kenya

To better understand this blind spot that I have and you might as well, Kenya, the seventh most populous country on the African continent, has seen .

Looking back just a few months, here’s a sampling of what we didn’t cover:

• recent from October 29, 2019.
• Series A from October 24, 2019.
• $15 million from October 22, 2019.
• Seed round of from October 6, 2019.
• Seed round from October 1, 2019.

Those and Twiga’s two-part round are just what we know has happened in Kenya in the past month. Indeed, Crunchbase reports over $4 billion in historical known dollar volume in the country, a figure that is conservative as some rounds are known by their title even as their financial weight remains occluded.

That’s a lot of money!

Crunchbase News has covered the African startup scene. During early Summer IPO this year our coverage was reasonable but late; how had we missed Jumia’s rise to an IPO-ready company, its recent struggles aside?

Something that I’ve learned watching our own Mary Ann Azevedo report from Texas is that there’s always far, far more going on in any town than you can see from afar. Splitting my time between San Francisco and Providence as I have for the past few years has also been an education. You can’t see Providence’s neat (if nascent) startup scene from SoMa, even if you can always feel the pulse of the latter in the former.

Twiga is a good reminder, then, that even as we write as fast as we can, we’re still missing more than we’re picking up.

�������ܲ��ٰ����پ��Dz�:��.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

The Nairobi, Kenya-based marketplace company has raised . Along with the equity financing, Twiga raised $6.2 million in debt financing.

So here’s why we care: We rarely dig into the VC space in Africa, let alone Kenya. Secondly, , Twiga’s Series B is history making on a couple counts.

What It Does

Founded in 2014, Twiga helps distribute Kenyan produce—onions, mangoes, avocados, and tons of other produce—to retailers. The produce goes to a collection center, then goes to a packhouse for distribution to various vendor shops. The company partners with over 8,000 vendors and claims that farmers receive payment in 24 hours.

Before a vendor can sell, a Twiga sales representative visits the farm to check it out. About 400 people work for the company, .

Kenya’s VC Space

, Twiga’s Series B is the biggest financing round raised by a Nairobi-based company in 2019, and the third largest round of all time for the city.

Beyond Goldman Sachs and TLcom, investors in Twiga include , , , , and more. A non-investing partner includes (USAID).

From here, we see that there’s a healthy show of United States investors interested in Nairobi-based companies. For example, is a global micro-seed fund based in Washington D.C., and , a Redwood City-based startup that has invested in companies like Digg, Meetup, and Anchor.

There’s also some local love, like , which describes itself as an impact-focused firm in Africa. Beyond Twiga, AHL has invested , such as , a food manufacturer in South Africa, and , a startup tackling the sustainably honey market.

And that’s not all. There were also checks from Switzerland and London, showing somewhat of a global interest.

I’ll leave you with this. TLcom said that “if Africa continues to generate companies of this caliber, more private capital will flow into the Continent and more entrepreneurs will be able to start and scale game-changing enterprises such as Twiga.”

So while Twiga’s round is big for the country and the continent, investor attitude tells me that Twiga’s record might soon be (happily) beat.

Illustration: