Apollo Agriculture Completes Kenya's First Private Agriculture Securitisation

A landmark transaction

Announced on 6 May 2026, the deal raised KES 276 million (approximately USD 2.1 million) by packaging Apollo's agricultural loan receivables into a financial instrument purchased by institutional investors. The underlying portfolio — valued at KES 370 million — covers 23,839 smallholder farmers across Kenya. Notably, 51% of those farmers are women, and around 22% are accessing formal credit for the very first time.

The transaction was structured through fintech platform Kaleidofin's "ki" platform, with investment provided by IDH Farmfit Fund, a blended finance impact fund. Supporting partners included FSD Africa (which assisted on legal, regulatory and investor engagement work), British International Investment (BII), which provided technical assistance to Apollo through its BII Plus facility, and the UK's MOBILIST programme, which contributed tax and structuring guidance.

What is securitisation — and why does it matter here?

Securitisation is a process by which a company bundles together a group of loans it has already issued and sells the expected future repayments to investors as a financial product. Rather than waiting for farmers to repay before lending again, Apollo can recycle that capital immediately, extending more loans to more farmers each season.

This is not a new concept globally — it has been used in solar energy finance, for example — but this transaction is notable for two reasons. First, it is the first time the model has been applied to agriculture in Kenya's private sector. Second, the financing is denominated in Kenyan Shillings rather than US dollars or euros. Many agri-finance companies in Kenya have historically borrowed in hard currency and on-lent in local currency, creating foreign exchange risk that ultimately gets passed on to farmers through higher rates. By raising KES-denominated capital, Apollo significantly reduces that risk for itself and — in principle — for the farmers it serves.

Apollo's CEO Eli Pollak described the deal as a step forward in scaling affordable local currency financing for farmers, adding that it should reduce funding costs over time.

Apollo's technology at the heart of the deal

The transaction's viability rests on the credit technology that EfD helped Apollo develop from the very beginning. Back in 2017, EfD approved a grant to fund a data scientist to build credit risk models using satellite and on-farm data — very early-stage R&D at the time. That investment helped lay the foundations for the platform Apollo runs today.

Apollo's approach combines satellite imagery of farm plots, machine learning models trained on agricultural yield patterns, and mobile-based data collection to build real-time credit profiles. This allows Apollo to make lending decisions for farmers who have no collateral and no formal credit history — the very customers traditional banks will not serve. Kaleidofin's proprietary "ki score" AI tool layers on top of this, using loan transaction data, credit bureau information and alternative data sources to assess portfolio risk and enable structured investment products.

The result is a tech stack capable of convincing institutional investors to put money into smallholder agriculture — a sector that has historically struggled to attract large-scale commercial capital due to high risk perceptions and a lack of transparency.

Part of a longer-term programme

This first close is positioned as the opening phase of a multi-year securitisation programme. According to reporting on the deal, the ambition is to mobilise approximately KES 2.37 billion and reach more than 130,000 farmers over time — a scale that would represent a transformative expansion of access to farm credit in Kenya.

Commercial banks currently allocate less than 5% of total lending to smallholder agriculture in Kenya, despite the sector's significant contribution to national food production. The Apollo-Kaleidofin structure is designed to open a new, sustainable channel of institutional capital into this gap.

Reflecting on EfD's early role

EfD's grant to Apollo in 2017 came at a point when the company was still developing its model and its evidence base. The funding supported the data science work needed to demonstrate that satellite data and alternative credit risk assessment could reliably predict repayment outcomes for smallholder farmers — the analytical foundation on which the entire lending model depends.

Seeing Apollo now attract institutional investors through a landmark securitisation deal is a reminder of the value of patient, early-stage support for innovative approaches. The pathway from R&D grant to capital markets transaction is rarely straightforward, but Apollo's journey illustrates how rigorous investment in underlying technology can ultimately unlock financing at a scale that grant funding alone could never achieve.

We congratulate the Apollo team on this milestone and look forward to following the next stages of their programme.

For more background on EfD's grant to Apollo Agriculture, see the Apollo Agriculture page on this website.