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Twiga Foods, once one of East Africa’s most closely watched venture-backed startups, has been placed under administration in Kenya.
The legal move strips its directors of executive control and hands management of the business to an appointed administrator. A gazette notice published on September 11 confirmed that GT Flow Limited, the entity formerly registered as Twiga Foods One Limited, entered administration on August 17, 2026, with insolvency practitioner Mohamed Mohamed appointed to run the company’s affairs.
“The Administrator acts on behalf of the Company without any personal liability,” the notice states.
Under the notice issued pursuant to section 541(2) of Kenya’s Insolvency Act, Mohamed now controls the company’s business assets and operations. Directors have lost the power to deal with or transact on the company’s assets without his express permission, and all operational matters must now be directed to him or his representatives.
Creditors have been given 30 days from the publication date to submit claims for inclusion in the company’s roll of creditors, and Mohamed has said he intends to engage stakeholders to work toward an orderly resolution.
Founded in Nairobi in 2014 by Peter Njonjo and Grant Brooke, Twiga Foods set out to fix Kenya’s fragmented fresh-produce supply chain. Its app-based logistics platform aimed to connect rural farmers directly with urban kiosks, fruit vendors and informal retailers, cutting out middlemen and stabilising prices.
The model attracted major global backers, and by November 2021, the company had raised a $50 million Series C round led by Creadev, with participation from TLcom Capital, IFC, Goldman Sachs’ Juven and DOB Equity, bringing the total funding to roughly $110 million at the time. Twiga further raised a cumulative $185.4 million, according to Crunchbase data, making it one of the well-backed startups in sub-Saharan Africa.
However, the asset-heavy nature of the business, which depended on warehousing, cold storage, transport, and extending credit to thousands of small informal retailers, burned through cash faster than the company could recover it.
To keep the business afloat, Twiga Foods began layoffs in November 2022, and by 2023, the company was falling behind on payments to suppliers and was locked in a public dispute with cloud provider Incentro Africa over an unpaid bill. A $35 million convertible bond in December 2023, partly funded by Njonjo’s own savings, bought time but not a turnaround; leading to Njonjo’s sabbatical and eventual resignation from the board, handing the CEO reins to former Jumia executive Charles Ballard.
Ballard cut hundreds more jobs and, in May 2025, pivoted the company toward an asset-light model by acquiring majority stakes in three FMCG distributors: Jumra, Sojpar and Raisons. The acquisition gave Twiga eight regional depots while it focused on backend software and data. The company also weighed abandoning its costly Tatu City hub for cheaper sites and briefly paused Nairobi operations, Techpoint Africa reported.
The restructuring ultimately failed to outrun Twiga’s legacy debts. The gazette notice offers no breakdown of GT Flow’s remaining assets or liabilities, leaving it unclear how much of the wider business, including the three distributor acquisitions, survives the process intact.
For now, the administrator holds the company’s fate, with creditors racing to file claims and stakeholders waiting to see whether Twiga’s decade-long attempt to modernise Africa’s food supply chain ends in restructuring or full wind-down.
