Hey, Hannatu here 👋
Most startups raise money once. They announce it, then go quiet.
Chikodi Ukaiwe does the opposite. His company, Salad Africa, is always raising, debt and equity, back-to-back, on purpose.
"We are constantly raising money," he says.
Not for growth alone. For survival.
Why an agritech runs like a bank
Here’s why.
Salad Africa buys produce from farmers. It pays them instantly, in cash.
Chikodi Ukaiwe, founder, Salad Africa. Image Source: Chikodi Ukaiwe
Then it sells to processors and exporters who don't pay for fourteen days.
That's the gap. Salad fronts the money to farmers, then waits two weeks to get paid back.
Every cycle. Every harvest. With money that isn't fully its own yet.
The model is simple. But the funding is not.
Salad isn't really selling rice or cashews. It's selling time, buying farmers fourteen days of patience they can't otherwise afford.
Why farmers can't wait
The fourteen-day problem exists because of a different number.
Roughly 40% of African produce never reach buyers at all.
Chikodi breaks it into three failures.
Factories sit hours away from the farms, which is still too far for a farmer with three or four bags. It costs money to transport it, and sometimes, there’s not even a good enough road network for vehicles.
Factories also set minimum order sizes, so oftentimes, farmers without truckloads have nowhere to sell.
Even when produce arrives, payment doesn't come immediately. "Most farmers don’t want to hear about bank processing," Chikodi says. "They want their money immediately."
Salad's answer is physical proximity.
Farmers gathered with their produce awaiting buyers. Image credit: Salad Africa
They mobilised agents with collection centres located close enough to farm gates that most farmers can walk there, drop off produce, have it quality-tested, and get paid the same day.
Sixteen years before Salad
Chikodi didn't arrive at this problem by accident. He spent sixteen years building toward it without knowing it.
In 2012, he joined Jumia as part of the founding team.
That was his introduction to the supply chain: how things move and where they usually go wrong. He stayed two years.
He then moved to Konga as VP of Vertical Development.
His job there put him further along the supply chain, where he gained even more experience in smoothly getting goods from sellers to buyers.
About seven years later, when he left, he understood the anatomy of a broken supply chain better than most people.
After Konga was acquired in 2017, Chikodi went independent.
His first major client was the Osun State Government, which had a specific problem: farmers were growing cassava, plantain, and cocoa that were spoiling in the field.
Chikodi worked on two fronts.
First was demand: how to get buyers outside the state to consume produce
Second was the supply chain, including logistics and cold storage.
By then, the pattern was clear.
Post-harvest loss wasn't a farming problem. It was a coordination and financing problem. And there weren't enough people building the infrastructure to solve it at scale.
It was during his consulting years that Salad Africa took shape.
At first, it was an embedded lending platform for SMEs. The company's original plan was straightforward: provide short-term financing to small businesses caught in the gap between delivering goods and getting paid.
It was simply a lender filling a specific cash flow hole.
The request that became a pivot
In 2025, one of Nigeria's biggest processors, Coscharis Rice Farms, called with a problem.
Farmers wanted instant payment. The processor wanted to pay in fourteen days. Chikodi stepped in as a lender to fill that gap. It was classic supply chain financing.
But what had started as embedded lending for SMEs had shown him that the gap between farmer and processor wasn't just a financing gap.
It was an infrastructure gap, a trust gap, and a coordination gap all at once.
Chikodi pivoted the entire company.
Salad Africa stopped being a lender and became what it is now: trade infrastructure for African agriculture. Embedded finance, logistics, procurement, and price visibility, all on one platform.
Since the pivot in mid-2025, Salad has moved about $7 million worth of agricultural produce, close to 15,000 metric tons across 11 states in Nigeria, plus Cameroon and the Benin Republic.
Chikodi on his trip to Niger State, Northern Nigeria. Image credit: Salad Africa
They've reached roughly 15,000 farmers.
And Chikodi believes they're just getting started.
Cutting the cycle in half
One of Salad Africa's biggest goals is to shrink that fourteen-day window to seven.
If it works, the company can recycle the same capital twice as often, something Chikodi says has never been done in the industry.
Two things slow the cycle down today.
Aggregation, since goods take one to two days to reach a collection center.
Drying, since produce harvested in peak season often needs time before it can travel.
The fix, according to Chikodi's telling, is proximity.
More collection centers placed nearer to buyers shorten the distance goods have to travel. Payment processing, he says, is already fast enough.
During last year's peak rice harvest season in November and December, Salad was already averaging under seven days.
The infrastructure to do it consistently just needs to catch up.
Borrowing trust, not building it
Salad didn't build that proximity from scratch. It borrowed trust that already existed.
Most agritech companies enter this space trying to replace the middleman. Salad onboarded them instead.
Micro-aggregators already operate in these communities, often with some of their own capital. Farmers already know and trust them.
Salad gives these aggregators a virtual wallet through a platform called SourcePro, loaded with a float to procure goods. Every 24 to 48 hours, Salad collects what they've aggregated.
Worker loading bags of produce to the truck. Image credit: Salad Africa
One partner in Niger State built a warehouse behind his own house, big enough for six trucks.
Another partner, who originally ran a convenience store in the community, created a collection point at her store where women drop off shea nuts. She logs everything on her phone, weighs it, does the quality check, and pays them.
Neither center is owned by Salad.
It's a franchise model built on relationships that predate the company by years.
And it's how Salad has scaled across multiple states quickly without investing directly in physical infrastructure itself, while still maintaining control over quality, payment, and information.
What Salad’s gap says about the industry
Salad's numbers are specific to one company. But the problem isn't.
Coordination and financing, rather than simply supply or demand, is the actual bottleneck across African agriculture.
The chain runs from the farm gate to the exchange rate.
In five years, Chikodi wants Salad operating across Nigeria, the Benin Republic, Cameroon, Tanzania, and Kenya. Same model but in new markets.
Physical collection centers close to farming communities, buyers within proximity, and enough liquidity to procure, deliver, get paid, and repeat.
His targets are specific.
He wants 30% - 40% of farmers in Salad's network to see a substantial increase in income. Import volumes of staples should drop.
Salad is betting that closing a fourteen-day cash gap, one collection center at a time, can interrupt that chain.
Whether it scales fast enough to matter is still a financing question, not a farming one.
The math behind the model
Salad Africa has agreements to supply $7 million in produce monthly. Right now, it delivers less than 10% of that.
The shortfall isn't with farmers. It isn't buyers either.
It's cash.
Chikodi says the company currently holds about $1 million in debt on its balance sheet.
To hit $7 million a month on a fourteen-day cycle, they need $3.5 million in debt at any given time. The gap between $1 million and $3.5 million is the entire business problem.
Chikodi is raising again, a $1 million equity round that should unlock another $2.5 to $3 million in debt behind it.
None of this shows up at the collection center. A farmer walks in, drops a sack, and walks out with cash in five minutes.
But behind that five minutes sits a spreadsheet of debt, equity, and a fourteen-day clock that never stops.
What other broken middles in African agriculture are just waiting for someone to fund the gap?
Cheers,
P.S. The next edition of Ag Safari will come out next Tuesday. We’re skipping this Thursday’s roundup to work on a H1 funding roundup, which we’ll publish next week on Tuesday. See you then.
