Two Nigerians Raise Over $10M to Transform Palm Waste.

Nigeria was once the undisputed king of global palm oil. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the country accounted for over 40% of global palm oil production, exporting more than enough to meet both domestic and international demand. Today, that dominance has collapsed to less than 2% of global production, and Nigeria now spends an estimated US$600 million annually importing the same commodity it once led the world in producing.

The causes of that collapse are numerous. But at the centre of it lies one defining structural failure: the persistent inability of Nigeria’s smallholder farmers, who make up the bulk of the country’s agricultural system, to process palm nuts efficiently, affordably, and at scale. That failure has consequently cost Nigeria’s farming communities decades of lost productivity, lost income, and lost global market share.

Releaf, founded in 2017 by Ikenna Nzewi and Uzoma Ayogu, two Americans of Nigerian descent who left careers and academic programmes at Yale and Duke to return to the country of their heritage, was built to solve exactly that problem. Furthermore, what began as a straightforward processing technology company has evolved into something considerably more ambitious: a climate-focused agritech enterprise that is turning agricultural waste into biochar, carbon credits, and a new model for sustainable agribusiness in Africa.

With over US$10 million raised, a proprietary processing system operating at 95% purity, and plans to remove 700,000 metric tons of CO₂ by 2030, Releaf is consequently one of the most compelling and consequential agritech stories emerging from Africa’s agricultural innovation ecosystem right now.

Two Founders, One Crisis, Twenty States

Before Releaf became one of Nigeria’s most closely watched agritech companies, it was an idea shared between two university students who believed that Africa’s food system was broken in ways that could be fixed, and that fixing it could lead to something much bigger.

Nzewi and Ayogu launched the company in 2017 and earned a place at Y Combinator that same year, placing Releaf among a new wave of globally backed African ventures. In its early days, the company experimented widely, moving between an agricultural marketplace model and trade finance before finding the specific problem worth solving.

That clarity came from the ground. The founders travelled across 20 of Nigeria’s 36 states, speaking to farmers, visiting processing facilities, and mapping the reality of palm oil production at the smallholder level. What they found was not simply a gap in the market. It was, as Nzewi describes it, a systemic collapse.

Smallholder farmers across Nigeria were still processing palm nuts manually. Using rocks, a farmer could crack approximately 2.5 metric tons of nuts per week, a rate so slow and physically demanding that it made commercial viability nearly impossible at the scale needed to compete in any meaningful market. Even where local machinery existed, it offered little improvement, often processing fewer than 24 metric tons per week with poor quality output and waste rates of up to 25% of total produce. For millions of Nigerian smallholder farmers, the system was consequently failing them at the most critical stage of their entire production cycle.

Building Kraken: West Africa’s Most Advanced Palm Nut Processing Technology

After two years of intensive research and development, Releaf’s answer to the processing crisis came in the form of Kraken, a proprietary palm nut processing system designed specifically around the realities of African agricultural production and the smallholder farmers at its heart.

“From the outset, we wanted to build West Africa’s most advanced palm nut processing technology,” Nzewi said.

When Kraken came online in January 2021, it could process 500 metric tons per week at 95% purity, significantly outperforming both local alternatives and competing favourably with imported industrial systems that cost more than US$350,000 and were designed for plantation-grown palm varieties, not the thicker-shelled nuts produced by Nigeria’s smallholder farmers. Kraken was built to handle precisely those nuts, and it cost less than half the price of imported alternatives.

The performance improvement over existing methods was furthermore staggering. Kraken was up to 25 times faster than existing local equipment and 240 times faster than manual cracking, while simultaneously reducing waste and improving kernel quality. That same year, the improvement in commercial viability attracted US$4.2 million in seed funding, a signal that the model was beginning to translate from proof-of-concept into a scalable business.

The first version of Kraken had a critical vulnerability, however. Because it operated as a single integrated system, any fault or maintenance requirement in one component brought the entire operation to a halt. Kraken 2, developed subsequently and launched as part of a US$3.3 million pre-Series A round in 2023, addressed this directly by introducing operational redundancy, allowing multiple processes to run simultaneously while maintenance occurred, with higher yields, lower costs, and reduced manpower requirements across the board.

Alongside Kraken 2, Releaf also launched SITE, a geospatial mapping tool developed in collaboration with Stanford University to optimise the placement of food processing infrastructure across Nigeria, ensuring that processing capacity is located where it can have the greatest impact on the smallholder farming communities it serves.

From Waste to Climate Value: The Birth of Releaf Earth

Every day, Releaf’s processing facilities produced large volumes of palm kernel shells, the solid byproduct left behind after palm nuts are cracked and the kernels extracted. For decades across Nigeria and the wider West African palm oil industry, these shells were burned, dumped, or sold at negligible value. They were treated, in other words, as the inevitable and inconsequential waste of an already inefficient system.

Releaf started to see them very differently.

“Africa produces roughly a billion tons of biomass every year,” Nzewi said. “And palm kernel shells are one of the best feedstocks for biochar you can find.”

That insight led to the creation of Releaf Earth, the company’s dedicated climate-focused arm, and a strategic pivot into industrial biochar production that is now reshaping how the company is valued, funded, and positioned in the global agribusiness and climate technology landscape.

Biochar is produced by heating organic material in a low-oxygen environment, transforming it into a stable carbon form that can remain in soil for hundreds or even thousands of years. Unlike carbon offsets or short-cycle interventions such as tree planting, biochar represents genuine, verifiable, long-term carbon removal. “These are technologies that remove carbon and store it in a way that it can’t return to the atmosphere for up to 1,000 years,” Nzewi explained.

The business case for biochar furthermore extends well beyond the climate impact alone. Biochar improves soil quality, increases water retention, and makes fertilisers more effective. In Releaf’s own trials, yields have improved by as much as 23% among farmers using biochar, generating a powerful commercial incentive for adoption alongside the environmental benefits. As farmers produce more, Releaf gains more supply. The company can simultaneously sell biochar at between US$400 and US$600 per ton and generate carbon removal credits priced at US$150 to US$200 per ton of CO₂ equivalent, creating two complementary and dollar-denominated revenue streams that have meaningfully strengthened the company’s financial position.

“It’s a win for our margins. It’s a win for our farmers. And it’s a win for the environment,” Nzewi said.

Releaf’s early biochar operations received support from grants provided by the Cisco Foundation and the German government-backed SAIS programme, recognising the critical role that patient, non-dilutive funding plays in helping climate technology companies navigate the expensive and uncertain early stages of a new market.

Building in a Tougher Funding Climate

Releaf’s strategic evolution into climate technology comes against the backdrop of a significantly more challenging funding environment for African agritech. Total agritech funding on the continent fell by nearly 20% in 2025 to under US$170 million, with deal activity also declining as global investors have become more cautious and more demanding around unit economics and the clarity of paths to profitability.

“There’s been a greater emphasis on strong unit economics and a clear path to profitability,” Nzewi acknowledged. For Releaf, the biochar and carbon credit business was consequently not purely a climate play. It was a deliberate strategic response to a changing investment landscape, introducing dollar-based revenue streams and improved margins at precisely the moment that the broader market was demanding greater financial discipline from its portfolio companies.

The founders’ professional networks have furthermore proven strategically valuable in navigating this environment. Nzewi previously worked at Bain and Company, while Ayogu turned down a role at Microsoft, one of the largest buyers of carbon credits globally. Those connections have opened doors in the carbon markets that might otherwise have taken years to access. However, Nzewi is clear that the broader opportunity in African climate technology requires something more than individual network advantages. “We need to adopt a mindset of partnership over mediocrity,” he said, cautioning that low-quality carbon credit projects carry systemic risks for the entire market. “If buyers lose confidence, demand disappears.”

What Comes Next: 2030 and Beyond

Releaf’s ambitions for the next five years are substantial and specific. By 2030, the company aims to remove up to 700,000 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent, recycle 50,000 metric tons of waste biomass annually, produce 20,000 metric tons of biochar each year, create over 500 jobs within Nigeria’s emerging carbon removal industry, and reach more than one million smallholder farmers through its combined processing and biochar operations.

These targets reflect a company that has moved decisively beyond the identity of a single-product agritech startup and into the more expansive and more strategically significant territory of a vertically integrated agricultural value chain and climate technology enterprise. The same supply chain that connects Nigeria’s smallholder palm oil farmers to food manufacturers is now opening a pathway into global carbon markets, with profound implications for farmer income, environmental impact, and the commercial viability of sustainable agriculture at scale in Africa.

For the broader African agricultural innovation ecosystem, Releaf’s story is consequently one of the most important and most instructive currently being written. It demonstrates that the most compelling agritech opportunities on the continent frequently sit not at the intersection of technology and convenience, but at the intersection of technology and structural agricultural failure, the kind of deep, systemic, decades-long failure that has cost nations their global market positions and cost farmers their livelihoods.

Palm kernel shells, once discarded as the inevitable residue of an inefficient system, are becoming the foundation of a new kind of climate business. And the farmers who produce them are, for the first time, beginning to see their place not just in Nigeria’s food system but in the global effort to address climate change.

Disclaimer

Africa Agricultural Network (AAN) is committed to informing and empowering agricultural communities across Africa as per our mandate. This article is intended for informational purposes only. Readers are advised to verify all details directly with Releaf before making any decisions.