TLG Capital, a London-based private credit firm founded by Zain Latif, has committed more than $65 million across Nigerian SMEs over the past two years, accelerating its push into Africa’s alternative credit ecosystem. The aggressive balance-sheet deployment reached its latest milestone after closing a structured credit facility for Koolboks, a manufacturer of solar-powered freezers serving informal traders and commercial food distributors across West Africa.

The transaction, according to Latif, principal at TLG Capital, pairs TLG’s debt with an institutional credit guarantee from Cascador, a scale-up accelerator for regional entrepreneurs, structured alongside Morgan Stanley. Marking the second joint facility between the partners within weeks, the facility underscores how foreign asset managers are deploying alternative debt vehicles to bypass commercial lenders and unblock persistent supply-chain bottlenecks.

Powering Africa’s cold chain

Koolboks will deploy the fresh credit to fund inventory expansion and broaden its distribution pipeline. The firm relies on debt to scale its capital-intensive manufacturing without diluting founders. The financing builds upon an $11 million Series A round closed in 2025, which blended equity, concessionary debt, and commercial grants to expand assembly operations.

Founded in Paris in 2018 by Ayoola Dominic and Deborah Gael, Koolboks designs freezers using proprietary thermal ice-battery storage paired with rooftop solar panels. Its proprietary pay-as-you-go architecture keeps perishable goods and essential vaccines chilled through frequent regional grid collapses, eliminating the need for expensive, fuel-thirsty backup diesel generators across frontier markets.

The company has deployed over 15,000 cooling appliances to date, operating a flagship assembly plant in Lagos. Koolboks employs 400 workers across Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda, while exporting hardware to 25 countries. Clean-tech cold storage remains vital across Sub-Saharan Africa, where post-harvest losses claim roughly a third of perishable food.

Capturing the missing middle

Former Wall Street bankers Zain Latif and Isha Doshi launched TLG Capital in 2009 to target underserved middle-tier firms. Latif cut his teeth at HSBC and Merrill Lynch before serving as an executive director at Goldman Sachs. Doshi, an alumna of Lehman Brothers and the London School of Economics, serves as chief financial officer.

The fund targets companies stranded in banking blind spots: commercial operations too sizable for microfinance lenders, yet too modest for global sovereign funds. By targeting this gap, TLG provides structured liquidity to mid-tier operators while securing commercial yields and measurable operational outcomes for allocators backing its underlying private credit funds.

To mitigate default risk across fragmented regulatory regimes, the firm deploys its Bank Originated and Mitigated Assets strategy. Instead of relying on hard collateral, which can trigger cumbersome local legal enforcement, the debt structure uses counterparty bank guarantees and standby letters of credit to safeguard capital while accelerating fund deployment cycles.

Unlocking a trillion-dollar frontier

With institutional support from development finance institutions like the World Bank’s IFC, Norfund, Swedfund, and France’s Bpifrance, TLG has structured more than $250 million across 50 regional deals. Recent credit deployments span private primary schools in Kenya, large-scale agro-processors in Tanzania, and mobile micro-insurance distribution networks across consumer segments in Ghana.

Latif argues small-to-medium enterprises represent an untapped $1 trillion commercial market across the continent. Small enterprises account for more than 90 percent of registered businesses and generate roughly 80 percent of jobs in key markets, yet traditional bank lines remain out of reach for capital-intensive companies seeking balance sheet expansion.

The fund manager works alongside domestic commercial lenders to scout balance sheets needing recapitalization or growth runways. Backed by syndication partners, TLG aims to underwrite and close bespoke balance-sheet facilities in roughly 10 weeks, betting that flexible private debt will unlock the next cohort of African industrial winners.