Afridigest Executive Brief: Africa's solar surge
Strategic Intelligence for Senior Executives | Week 35: August 24-30, 2025
The Afridigest Executive Brief delivers essential intelligence to busy executives.
To those who shared feedback on the format last week: Thanks & you’ll notice some changes this week. 🙏🏽
A summary of this week’s key trends:
• Climate solutions finding scale through localized manufacturing & circular economy models
• Solar adoption accelerating across Africa with 60% growth in panel imports from China
• AI-augmented services delivering measurable impact in sectors with acute skill shortages
Deal of the Week
🇳🇬 Koolboks, a Paris-headquartered Franco-Nigerian climatetech that offers solar-powered cold storage & smart refrigeration solutions across Africa, raised an $11M Series A from KawiSafi Ventures (lead), Aruwa Capital (co-lead), and All On. The round includes additional debt funding from FFEM and bpifrance, plus grant funding and results-based financing from various sources.
About Koolboks: Founded in 2018, Koolboks has deployed over 10,000 solar freezers across 25 countries. The company pivoted from its initial focus on European camping refrigerators to off-grid cooling solutions for African small businesses in 2020. Koolboks’ IoT-enabled units provide four-day refrigeration without power, using solar energy and thermal storage, via a Pay-As-You-Go model with monthly payments of $10-20, primarily serving market women, food sellers, bars, and rural clinics.
Key personalities:
Ayoola Dominic, Co-Founder & CEO
Deborah Gaël, Co-Founder & COO
Amar Inamdar, PhD, Managing Director at KawiSafi Ventures
Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes, Founder at Aruwa Capital Management
In the Founder’s words: “Every day, I meet small business owners, mostly women, who are forced to throw away unsold food or burn diesel just to stay open. For them, cooling is not about convenience. It's about survival, dignity, and income. This raise allows us to deepen our reach, build locally, and put power literally back in their hands.” — Ayoola Dominic
Pair with: Africa’s cold rush and the promise of refrigeration (The New Yorker 2022)
In the Investor’s words: “We have been impressed with Koolboks’s innovative solution, which goes far beyond food waste reduction — the team’s laser focus on ensuring clean, renewable energy in off-grid areas is crucial to the survival of many small businesses and sectors as well as fostering economic gender equality.” — Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes
Go deeper: The funding will be used to establish Koolbok’s first local assembly plant in Nigeria, scale the company’s BNPL platform and expand ‘Scrap4New,’ a circularity program that converts discarded freezers into solar-powered, IoT-enabled units.
Learn more by joining the conversation this Friday:
Deal Digest
$23M in new funding to African startups was announced this week. Here’s the full list: