Victory Farms, a tilapia fish aquaculture firm 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 fish 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 money will help the Kenyan enterprise expand into Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Tanzania.
Victory Farms was created in 2015 by Joseph Rehmann. Rehmann spoke about his route to founding the startup. After finishing his MBA program, he worked in Ghana for three months on an aquaculture project, which led to a three-year position as CFO of an Accra-based farm.
“I learnt a lot about aquaculture scaling and all that. I believed the platform I was running could be a lot bigger and scale a lot faster if we could connect more dots — and basically creating an end to end protein plant,” said Rehmann, who previously worked for an investment bank and Microsoft.
In 2015, Rehmann and his longstanding 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 businesses.
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