Twiga Foods, once hailed as a standout among East Africa’s venture-backed ventures, has fallen into administration following years of mounting debts, painful staff cuts, and repeated efforts to overhaul its cash-burning business model.

A Kenyan legal gazette notice published Sept. 11 revealed that GT Flow Ltd, the legal entity previously registered as Twiga Foods One Ltd, went into administration on Aug. 17. The court-backed move strips company directors of executive authority and places its assets and operations squarely in the hands of administrator Mohamed Mohamed.

“The administrator takes control over the business assets and the management of the affairs of the Company without personal liability,” the official filing stated. Mohamed said he plans to consult stakeholders to work toward an orderly resolution, giving creditors a 30-day window to file their claims.

Twiga Foods fails despite $185 million funding

The collapse marks a sobering turn for a company that raised $185.4 million from global investors, according to data from Crunchbase, making it one of the most heavily capitalized startups in sub-Saharan Africa.

Peter Njonjo and Grant Brooke founded Twiga in 2014 to fix the country’s disjointed fresh-produce supply chain. The company built an app-based logistics system to link rural farmers directly with urban fruit vendors, neighbourhood kiosks, and roadside grocers, promising to cut out price-gouging middlemen.

In practice, running large warehouse fleets, handling perishable goods, and extending credit to small informal shops bled cash faster than the business could bring it in. By late 2023, the cracks were hard to hide. Twiga was shedding staff, falling behind on payments to vendors, and locked in a high-profile commercial dispute with cloud services provider Incentro.

To keep the lights on, Njonjo helped pull together a $35 million convertible bond package in December 2023 from long-term backers Creadev and Juven, even chipping in $1 million of his own savings. But the breathing room proved short-lived. Njonjo stepped back on a six-month sabbatical, eventually resigned from the board in early 2024, and handed the chief executive role to former Jumia executive Charles Ballard.

Twiga pivot stumbles over past debts

Ballard moved quickly to stop the bleeding, laying off more workers and changing the startup’s playbook entirely. Rather than building out its own costly logistics network from scratch, Twiga bought majority stakes in May 2025 in three established consumer-goods distributors: Jumra, Sojpar, and Raisons. The purchases gave Twiga eight regional depots across Kenya’s Central, Coast, and Western regions, alongside an existing customer base.

Internal planning records from that period pointed to the creation of a holding firm, known internally as “newco,” designed to sit above the individual trading units. Twiga described the shift as a move toward a franchise-style model, where the three acquisitions ran day-to-day deliveries on their own while Twiga centralized backend software, buying, and data analysis.

The cost-cutting pushed out more than 300 staff members. At the same time, management weighed ditching or renegotiating its costly hub at Tatu City in favor of cheaper commercial industrial pockets around Nairobi, including Baba Dogo, Mombasa Road, and Syokimau.

Yet the financial overhaul was not enough to outrun past obligations. GT Flow’s descent into administration leaves immediate doubts hanging over how much of the broader operating business remains intact. The legal notice leaves key questions unanswered, offering no breakdown of GT Flow’s remaining assets and debts, or whether the court proceedings directly threaten the operations of the three newly acquired distributor units.