KOOLBOKS’ JOURNEY TO BUILD RESILIENT COLD-CHAIN INFRASTRUCTURE ACROSS AFRICA

What if a simple cooling device could unlock income, cut food waste, and strengthen entire communities? In this edition, we explore the story of Koolboks, co-founded by Ayoola Dominic, and how a technology first designed for leisure was reimagined to solve one of Africa’s most urgent challenges, unreliable power and post-harvest loss. From solar-powered freezers and pay-as-you-go financing to local assembly and data-driven scale, this article traces Koolboks’ journey, impact on women-led microbusinesses, and bold vision to build resilient, clean cold-chain infrastructure across the continent.

1. What inspired the start of Koolboks, and how did experiences before founding the company influence the approach today?

Koolboks was born from a pivotal realization: that technology designed for leisure in Europe could solve a crisis in Africa. The founders, Ayoola Dominic and Deborah Gael, initially developed a powered cooler for camping. However, witnessing the devastating cycle of food waste and reliance on polluting, expensive diesel generators due to unreliable electricity grids, a reality faced by their own families in Nigeria, demanded a profound pivot.

The founders’ combined experience emphasized two key pillars: first, designing a solution perfectly suited to the realities of intermittent power; and second, recognizing the crucial role of financial inclusion. This led to the creation of the Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) model, transforming a life-changing asset from a massive capital expense into an affordable, income-generating tool.

2. Which value chains or sectors is Koolboks focused on, and what impact have you seen so far in reducing losses?

Koolboks is strategically focused on tackling the massive 30-40% post-harvest losses that undermine food security and livelihoods across Africa. We primarily target:

• Farmers, Micro-Entrepreneurs, and Traders: This includes smallholder farmers, women market vendors, and micro-retailers who deal in perishable goods such as fish, meat, beverages, fruits, and vegetables. They form the backbone of local economies and rural trade networks.
• Rural Healthcare: Ensuring the integrity of the cold chain for vaccines and temperature-sensitive medicines in off-grid clinics.

The impact is measured not just in kilowatt-hours saved, but in income stabilization and empowerment. Users report a significant reduction in inventory spoilage and energy costs, often saving up to 50% compared to running diesel. For the small business owners, mostly women, this translates directly to increased daily profit and economic resilience, allowing them to reinvest and grow their livelihoods.

3. Which African markets are you primarily operating in, and how do you decide where to expand next?

Our largest market and operational anchor is Nigeria. We also have strong traction in Kenya and Uganda, having deployed over 10,000 units across approximately 25 countries in total. Our expansion strategy is disciplined, focusing on areas where our solution can create the greatest impact:

• Demand and Need: Prioritizing regions with high energy poverty, acute food waste, and strong reliance on expensive, polluting cooling.
• Ecosystem Readiness: Assessing markets for a functional mobile money or digital payment infrastructure, which is essential for our financing models.
• Localizing Supply Chain: The move to local assembly in Nigeria serves as the blueprint for eventual decentralized assembly in other regional hubs, customizing our approach to local regulations and logistics.

4. Who are the primary users of Koolboks products, and how do you reach and encourage adoption in markets with limited refrigeration access?

The core of our user base is the woman micro-entrepreneur, such as the fish seller at the market or the frozen food vendor, who accounts for roughly 63% of our customers.

Our adoption strategy is built on overcoming the twin barriers of cost and trust:

• Inclusive Financing: Our PAYGO and Koolbuy (BNPL) options break down the high upfront cost into affordable, manageable payments aligned with the customers’ cash flow cycle.
• Hyper-Local Proof: We build trust through local champions and community validation. The success story of a vendor’s freezer keeping stock fresh for days is more powerful than any advertising campaign.
• PowerFoot Pedestal Reliability: Our solar-powered “PowerFoot” system guarantees dependable cooling performance even in low-sunlight conditions, making it ideal for regions with unstable grids. Supported by our advanced ice battery technology, users enjoy extended cooling autonomy, ensuring their business continues uninterrupted, even during power outages.

5. How would you describe Koolboks’ business model today, and what makes it scalable across diverse markets?

Koolboks utilizes a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, a powerful hybrid of hardware sales, digital financing, and data services.

The business is highly scalable because:

• Asset De-Risking: Our proprietary IoT technology is embedded in every unit, allowing for remote monitoring and temporary deactivation in case of payment default. This significantly lowers the credit risk profile of our micro-finance portfolio, making the model attractive to institutional capital.
• Financing Agnostic: The PAYGO/BNPL structure is a universally scalable solution for capital constraints, regardless of the local currency or economic stage.
• Local Assembly Blueprint: By proving that local assembly can drastically reduce costs (by 15-20%) and complexities in Nigeria, we establish a repeatable blueprint for scaling production across the continent, adapting to diverse supply chain conditions.

6. How do your pay-as-you-go or buy-now-pay-later options make ownership affordable for small businesses?

The primary challenge for small businesses is not the operational running cost of the freezer, but the initial Capital Expenditure (Capex). Our financing options dismantle this barrier:

• PAYGO (Pay-As-You-Go): This model converts a large, prohibitive purchase into a manageable operational expense. The initial deposit is low, and subsequent payments, made via mobile money, are scheduled to coincide with the customer's daily or weekly cash flow. Critically, the recurring payment is often less than the money the user saves on buying ice or diesel, meaning the freezer effectively pays for itself.
• Koolbuy (BNPL): Our broader platform offers flexible installment plans for cooling appliances using the customer’s consistent payment history on the Koolboks unit to build a verified, digital credit score. This makes ownership accessible and paves the way for greater financial inclusion.

7. Could you walk us through the unit economics of a typical Koolboks freezer, and how this informs your growth strategy?

The profitability of Koolboks is centered on maximizing the Lifetime Value (LTV) of the customer while continually driving down the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and managing Credit Risk.

This informed strategy allows us to aggressively scale deployment because we have validated that our LTV/CAC ratio is strong, and our financial model is resilient, securing the debt capital needed to finance our growth.

8. How do technology, IoT, and AI support operations, from monitoring freezers to predicting maintenance and understanding customer behavior?

Our technology stack is the strategic core of the Koolboks platform, enabling both operational efficiency and financial innovation.

• Remote Monitoring: The IoT module tracks essential metrics in real-time: temperature, payment status, energy consumption, and geolocation. This data allows for immediate remote deactivation for credit management and ensures optimal performance for food safety.
• Predictive Maintenance: We use data analytics to monitor performance anomalies, allowing us to proactively predict and service potential component failures before they lead to inventory loss for the customer. This commitment to predictive reliability builds customer trust and reduces costly, time-consuming reactive repairs.
• Customer Behavior and Financial Inclusion: Analyzing payment consistency and usage patterns creates a verified digital credit history for micro-entrepreneurs who were previously financially invisible. This data is the foundation for future services, allowing us to connect these customers to micro-finance banks and other capital opportunities.

9. Assembling the freezers in Nigeria is a major step. Beyond reducing import costs, how will it influence pricing, accessibility, and long-term competitiveness?

Local assembly in Nigeria is our biggest step toward achieving true scale and cost leadership in the African clean cooling market.

• Pricing and Accessibility: The most immediate influence is the projected 15–20% reduction in retail price. This makes our technology accessible to a much deeper segment of the population. Furthermore, it significantly reduces lead times and inventory shortages caused by complex international shipping.
• Long-Term Competitiveness: This move fundamentally transforms our strategic position from an importer to a local value-creator . It demonstrates commitment to the local economy through job creation, provides a stable, resilient domestic supply chain shielded from foreign exchange volatility, and creates a rapid feedback loop for product customization based on local market needs. This infrastructure is a significant competitive barrier to entry.

10. What were the biggest lessons from the $11 million Series A fundraising journey, and what advice would you give to other founders seeking growth capital?

The successful $11 million Series A round was validation that impact and profit can be mutually reinforcing.

The Biggest Lesson: You must prove that your technology de-risks your business model. Our ability to show investors, through real-time IoT data, that our credit risk was manageable and that our customers were predominantly women whose businesses were being stabilized was key. This transformed our micro-finance portfolio from a ‘risky’ asset into a predictable, high-impact one.

Advice for Founders:

• Build the Foundation Before the Ask: Don’t fundraise on potential; fundraise on proven unit economics. Show a clear, data-backed LTV/CAC ratio and a solid repayment history.
• Focus on Local Partnerships: Secure local, strategic investors like All-On and Aruwa Capital. Their presence validates your deep market understanding and ability to navigate complexity, which is invaluable to international investors.
• Tell an Impact Story with Financial Rigor: Frame your mission (e.g., climate action, gender inclusion) not as charity, but as a superior business strategy that opens access to significant Development Finance and Impact Capital.

11. How will this new funding help expand Koolboks’ mission and reach more businesses and communities across Africa?

This $11 million is the fuel for exponential growth, allowing us to scale our mission on three fronts:

• Industrialization: Establishing the Nigerian assembly plant will dramatically increase output and cut costs, enabling us to flood underserved markets with affordable units.
• Financial Depth: It strengthens the balance sheet, allowing us to deploy more capital into our PAYGO and Koolbuy financing platforms, accelerating the rate at which businesses can access and own our technology.
• Platform Growth: We will invest in technology to move beyond cooling and become a financial gateway. By leveraging our customer data, we can start connecting our entrepreneurs to a wider ecosystem of capital and supply chain opportunities, truly expanding our mission of economic empowerment.

12. How do Koolboks contribute to broader development goals, such as climate action, food security, and gender inclusion?

Koolboks’ contribution is foundational to the development goals of the continent:

• Climate Action: By replacing diesel generators with solar-powered, ice-battery technology, we directly reduce carbon emissions and accelerate the transition to clean, distributed energy(SDG7).
• Food Security: We directly combat up to 40% post-harvest loss (SDG 2), ensuring more food reaches the market and stabilizing the incomes of farmers and traders.
• Gender Inclusion: With women constituting the majority of our customers, our work is intrinsically linked to economic empowerment (SDG 5). We provide them with an essential tool that reduces risk, increases profit, and builds a formal financial identity.

13. Scaling across multiple countries comes with regulatory, logistical, and operational challenges. How have you navigated these to maintain growth?

Scaling in Africa requires an operational model built for resilience and adaptability:

• Operational Resilience: Our primary defense is the IoT system, which allows us to remotely diagnose and manage our fleet. This significantly cuts down the cost and complexity of after-sales service across vast distances.
• Logistical Solutions: We navigate poor infrastructure and high import costs by decentralizing our operations, using regional hubs for inventory management, and now, leveraging the Nigerian assembly plant to eliminate the risks of the global supply chain for our biggest market.
• Regulatory Flexibility: We do not rely on a single solution. We ensure full compliance by partnering with strong local experts and adapting our payment integrations to the diverse array of mobile money and digital banking systems in each country, ensuring our PAYGO model remains seamless and legal everywhere we operate.

14. Looking ahead to the next five years, what do you hope Koolboks will achieve for small businesses, healthcare facilities, and communities across Africa?

Our five-year vision is to see Koolboks recognized not just as a cooling company, but as a vital piece of Africa’s clean, resilient infrastructure.

• For Small Businesses: We aim to multiply our current customer base many times over, transforming thousands of micro-businesses into financially empowered enterprises. We will have successfully leveraged our data platform to formally unlock millions in third-party credit for our users, turning the freezer into a financial asset.
• For Healthcare: We will be a primary partner in ensuring that clean, reliable cold chains are the standard, not the exception, in every rural health clinic we serve.
• For Africa: We will have firmly established our local assembly operations as a major industrial engine, creating green jobs, significantly reducing food waste across West Africa, and proving that sustainable, innovative technology is the most powerful path to economic prosperity. We intend for Koolboks to be synonymous with African resilience and empowerment.

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