Acumen Angels and the power of catalytic capital
How early-stage funding gives founders the space to strengthen their ventures and better serve the communities where they work
- Blog
- All impact sectors
- All Regions
For Ahmed Oyedotun, growth brought new questions.
Afrimash, the Nigerian agri-input platform he co-founded, was gaining traction. Farmers were turning to the platform to access quality seeds, fertilizers, and livestock inputs without relying on unreliable middlemen. Demand increased, and the opportunity to reach more farmers became clear.
But as the company expanded, Ahmed and his team began asking deeper questions about how best to scale while maintaining trust with the farmers they served.
“At the time, we had uncertainty around our go-to-market strategy. Our most selling category, day-old chicks, was facing increasing challenges as customers demanded more quality service, lower mortality, and quality delivery.”
Ahmed Oyedotun, co-founder and chief executive officer of Afrimash
The team realized that, to keep customer confidence intact as the platform grew, they would need to provide more transparent order and product tracing. To do that, they would need to strengthen their technology infrastructure and improve delivery points for day-old chicks. That in turn would require what so many promising start-ups in underfunded markets struggle to find: catalytic capital.
So Ahmed, a 2023 West Africa Acumen Fellow, applied for Acumen Angels — an early-stage capital award designed to advance our community of impact-driven entrepreneurs. The Acumen Angels award supports business models and leaders with a high potential to solve problems of poverty and build a world based on dignity.
This week we announced 30 new Angels awardees. These social innovators, like Ahmed, often navigate moments of real promise and uncertainty, when the need for their solution is clear but the path to sustainable growth and scale is still taking shape. At that stage, the right capital can be game-changing.
For Afrimash, the results were immediate and practical. With capital from Acumen Angels in 2023, Afrimash improved the quality of its day-old chick deliveries through 16 newly established pickup centers. It also expanded transparent order traceability through Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), making it easier for customers to access services without needing to visit the company’s website. For farmers in areas with limited or no internet access, that mattered. Within six months, sales had doubled. So did the improvement in service, as mortality at delivery points dropped from about 0.7% of orders to less than 0.1%.
Better decisions need breathing room
For early-stage entrepreneurs solving complex problems, catalytic capital does more than fund implementation. It can create the room to pause, test assumptions, focus on the problem more clearly, and ask sharper questions about what the business really needs in order to grow. That kind of space is rare and often transformative.
In Afrimash’s case, that space helped Ahmed and his team look more closely at how customers were actually interacting with the business. With support from a pro-bono consulting engagement with Bain & Company, a long-term partner of Acumen, Afrimash uncovered a new channel in addition to USSD. They realized that many farmers engaged through WhatsApp, a channel they already used every day. That insight helped shape the company’s next step, including the development of Afrimash’s AI-powered agricultural virtual assistant, AVA, which allows customers to order through WhatsApp, track deliveries, and receive agricultural advice.
Today, WhatsApp and USSD power about 30% of Afrimash’s monthly sales.
“From the farmer support solutions we built to the improvement in service delivery to a clear roadmap, it is clear that we can serve customers better and gain the trust of our customers.”
Ahmed Oyedotun, co-founder and chief executive officer of Afrimash
Since receiving the Acumen Angels award, Afrimash has continued to strengthen its operations and now serves more than 8,000 customers and directly impacts 45,000 lives. Its growth reflects what becomes possible when impact-driven entrepreneurs have the resources not only to move faster, but to think more clearly about how they grow. That is the role Acumen Angels is designed to play.
Today, a new group of founders steps into that same moment. Since launching in 2018, Acumen Angels has awarded $5.9 million to 128 early-stage organizations globally. Together, these leaders have reached more than 27 million lives, created over 106,000 jobs, served more than 883,000 paying customers, and raised more than $54 million in follow-on capital.
The 2025 Acumen Angels awardees represent the next generation of leaders working to bring bold solutions to historically excluded communities. From climate innovations across Africa to new models of community leadership, and financial inclusion around the world, these founders are tackling urgent challenges while building systems that enable long-term change.
Click here to see the full list of our 2025 Acumen Angels awardees.
More from our Knowledge Hub
From wealth to agency: How women can fund a more just future
Michelle Yue on expanding women’s agency and using philanthropic capital to transform entrenched gender inequities.
