Kenyan agritech venture studio Pyramidia Ventures has raised $1.5 million from Dutch impact investor Triple Jump to expand its model of building and scaling climate-focused startups. The package comprises $1.3 million in funding plus $200,000 for technical assistance and business development provided through the Dutch Good Growth Fund (DGGF), which Triple Jump manages.
Unlike traditional accelerators that back founder-led teams, Pyramidia operates as a venture builder: it originates concepts in-house, conducts early pilots, then recruits co-founders to spin the best ideas into independent companies. The approach is designed to compress the riskiest part of company creation while freeing founding teams from time-consuming corporate administration and fundraising so they can focus on product–market fit and scale.
Founded in 2021 by Ruth Bertens (ex-McKinsey) and Joseph Rehmann (founder of Victory Farms), Pyramidia targets pain points in Africa’s agri-food systems—water stress, input inefficiency, traceability, and protein supply—where climate resilience and unit economics intersect. The studio’s process borrows globally proven technologies and adapts them to local realities, moving ideas through pilot → build → scale with shared services for finance, legal, data, and field operations.
Early signs of the model’s promise are emerging in the portfolio. Stable Foods, which provides irrigation-as-a-service to smallholders on a subscription basis, pools demand to make micro-irrigation affordable for small plots. The venture recently validated Pyramidia’s methodology by closing a $600,000 seed round from the Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund and Mercy Corps Ventures. Other studio companies include Womega, focused on streamlining the fish supply chain, and Afriprotein, developing alternative proteins for animal and human consumption—each addressing efficiency, climate impact, and food security from different angles.
For investors like Triple Jump, the studio model offers a systematic way to de-risk very early-stage bets in tough operating environments. Concentrating the ideation and pilot phases inside a professional build team can create a repeatable pipeline of investor-ready ventures rather than one-off successes. The technical assistance component from DGGF is equally strategic: it funds the unglamorous but vital capacity—tooling, data systems, farmer onboarding playbooks—that improves execution and shortens time to traction.
Still, venture building comes with its own hurdles. Many African early-stage investors are accustomed to backing charismatic solo founders who own nearly all the equity. Studios must persuade them to view the venture studio itself as a co-founder—bringing speed, operating muscle, and shared infrastructure in exchange for a meaningful stake. If that mindset shift sticks, the model could attract more blended capital to climate-smart agriculture, where returns depend on both agronomic outcomes and financial discipline.
With the new funding, Pyramidia plans to launch at least two new ventures per year, deepen field operations, and expand shared services that portfolio teams can plug into from day one. The goal is straightforward but ambitious: build a pipeline of investable companies that make Africa’s agri-food systems more resilient and lower-carbon, while proving that studio-born startups can scale faster and withstand shocks better than their peers.
If the next cohort performs like Stable Foods—showing measurable gains in yields, water use, and farmer income—Pyramidia will not only validate its thesis; it could also set a template for how venture studios become climate infrastructure in emerging markets.
