Meet the founders who raised over $10 million from palm processing and the waste it leaves behind in Africa
Founded in 2017 by Ikenna Nzewi and Uzo Ayogu, Releaf has grown from a simple agricultural marketplace into a company building its own processing technology and turning palm waste into climate value. The founders, Americans of Nigerian descent, returned to Nigeria to tackle challenges in Africa’s largest oil palm market, raising over $10 million along the way.
- Releaf, founded in 2017 by Ikenna Nzewi and Uzo Ayogu, has evolved from an agricultural marketplace into a tech-driven processor focused on Nigeria's palm oil industry.
- They developed Kraken, a proprietary palm nut processing system, to address inefficiencies and waste in traditional methods for smallholder farmers.
- Releaf's innovations have improved farmer yields and attracted over $10 million in funding despite a tougher investment climate.
- By 2030, Releaf aims to remove 700,000 metric tons of CO₂, recycle 50,000 tons of waste, produce 20,000 tons of biochar annually, and impact over one million farmers with over 500 new jobs.
Before Releaf became one of Nigeria’s most closely watched agritech companies, it was little more than an idea shared by two founders still in school.
Ikenna Nzewi and his friend Uzoma Ayogu started the company in 2017 with a simple belief, that Africa’s food system was broken in ways that could be fixed, and that solving it could lead to something much bigger.
That ambition got Releaf into Y Combinator in 2017, placing the startup among a new wave of globally backed African ventures. But getting into one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious accelerators didn’t mean they had everything figured out.
In its early days, Releaf experimented. It moved between ideas, from an agricultural marketplace to trade finance, searching for something that could truly work within the realities of African markets.
That search eventually led Nzewi and Ayogu, both Americans of Nigerian descent and then students at Yale and Duke, back to Nigeria, their country of origin and Africa’s largest producer of oil palm. They travelled across 20 of Nigeria’s 36 states, trying to understand where technology could actually make a difference. What they found was not just a gap. It was a collapse.
Nigeria used to lead the global palm oil market. Today, it’s one of its biggest importers. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the country accounted for over 40% of global palm oil production, exporting more than enough to meet both local and international demand.
Today, Nigeria’s share of global production has fallen to less than 2% as of 2024. At the same time, the country now spends an estimated $600 million annually importing palm oil. The problem wasn’t a lack of demand, and it’s not because there aren’t enough farmers. The real issue is how the system works.
Across the country, smallholder farmers, who make up the bulk of Nigeria’s agricultural system, still rely on manual methods to process palm nuts. The work is slow, physically demanding, and highly inefficient.
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“Using rocks, farmers could crack about 2.5 metric tons of nuts a week,” Nzewi said. “It’s extremely slow and drudgerous for that level of return.”
Even where machinery existed, it wasn’t much better. Some local equipment could process less than 24 metric tons per week, often with poor quality output. In many cases, up to 25% of farmers’ produce went to waste. For Nzewi and Ayogu, this was the real problem, and it was the one Releaf was built to solve.
Building Kraken
The solution became Kraken. After two years of research and development, Releaf built a proprietary palm nut processing system designed to handle the realities of African agriculture.
“It took two years of intensive R&D,” Nzewi said. “From the outset, we wanted to build West Africa’s most advanced palm nut processing technology.”
That difference mattered, especially because imported de-shelling machines, often used by large companies, can process up to 720 metric tons per week, but come with trade-offs. They cost over $350,000 and are designed for plantation-grown palm varieties, not the thicker-shelled nuts produced by smallholder farmers.
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Kraken was built differently. When it came online in January 2021, it could process 500 metric tons per week at 95% purity, significantly higher than the industry average. It also costs less than half the price of imported systems.
More importantly, it worked where others didn’t. It was faster than local alternatives, up to 25 times faster than existing equipment and 240 times faster than manual cracking, while reducing waste.
That same year, Releaf raised $4.2 million in seed funding, a sign the model was beginning to work.
Fixing what breaks
The first version of Kraken handled everything, from preparing the nuts to cracking and separating kernels, in one integrated system. But it had a flaw. If one part failed, everything stopped.
“So Kraken 1 only had one cracker,” Nzewi explained. “If it got blocked or needed maintenance, the whole system would shut down.”
Kraken 2 fixed that. The upgraded system introduced redundancy, allowing multiple processes to run simultaneously without shutting down operations. Maintenance could happen while the machine continued working. At the same time, performance improved across the board, higher yields, lower costs, and reduced manpower. It was a more efficient, more resilient system that came at a critical time.
In 2023, Releaf raised $3.3 million in pre-Series A funding to scale its operations and launch new products, including Kraken II and SITE, a geospatial mapping tool developed in collaboration with Stanford University to optimize the placement of food processing infrastructure.
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