Kenyan Startup Gro Intelligence Shuts Down

Nairobi-based agri-tech startup, Gro Intelligence, has announced that it will shut down. This comes after the company had raised an emergency funding in March, 2024, and replaced its CEO and founder Sara Menker.

According to AgFunderNews, the business was unable to raise further capital from existing and new investors, despite the March bridge round. The company’s struggles became public in February 2024 followig reports that it was struggling to meet payroll and pension payments despite raising $117 million throughout its existence.

The company laid off 60 percent of its staff in March 2024 and will lay off the remaining staff in New York and Nairobi but retain a skeleton team to help wind up operations. Former employees sued Gro over alleged labour violations after it laid them off without notice in March. The company is also under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reportedly over fraud, according to AgFunderNews.

Gro Intelligence was founded in 2012 by energy commodity trader Sara Menker, and collected data from governments, financial markets, and weather agencies to give agricultural companies actionable insights. One of its biggest customers is FMCG company Unilever.

While the current investigations and legal woes have escalated the company’s problem, its collapse was caused by a tough fundraising environment and a product-market-fit issue.

Gro is the third well-funded startup to shut down in 2024 after iProcure, a B2B agricultural inputs distributor, and Copia, a B2C e-commerce platform that entered administration in May.