Kenyan startup Flowt, an AI-driven financial intelligence platform that makes Africa’s climate-smart businesses investable, has closed an undisclosed pre-seed round of funding.
The Nairobi-based Flowt, founded by Elana Laichena, uses AI to turn messy financial records into lender-ready data, opening working capital to Africa’s climate-smart businesses. Its first facility goes to GreenBay, a Kenyan appliance refurbisher whose growth was capped by inventory it could not afford to hold.
The funding round, secured from Delta40 Fund I, Impacc and Argidius Foundation, will support Flowt’s growth as it deploys capital across Kenya and builds the financial intelligence layer that makes businesses legible to lenders.
“Funders in Africa have three bad options when they look at a small business. Ask for collateral it does not have. Spend six months on due diligence, which makes a small loan uneconomical. Or assume the worst, price for it, and charge an interest rate the business cannot afford. All three are responses to the same problem, which is that nobody can see trustworthy numbers,” said Laichena. “Flowt lends against verified transaction history, which makes working capital both fast and affordable.”
GreenBay is a fast-growing circular commerce business for home, solar and other appliances, making quality, affordable products more accessible by sourcing, testing, refurbishing and reselling pre-owned and second-life equipment to households and small businesses. It faces a constraint as old as commerce – its sales are directly proportional to the inventory it can hold, so its growth ceiling is set by working capital, not demand. More stock means more sales. Less stock means fewer.
A bank would recognise that logic instantly and still decline the loan. GreenBay is in its second year of operations, not yet at scale, and sells to households and SMEs rather than to corporate customers whose credit a lender could lean on. Those are the boxes a bank ticks when it cannot afford to ask the real question: does this business collect its money, and can it carry a repayment?
Flowt read it another way. It integrated with GreenBay’s Odoo system to see the operating picture, then verified it independently through AI and machine-learning analysis of the company’s bank statements. Position, cash movement and repayment capacity were assessed in days rather than months, on evidence the business already generates in the ordinary course of trading.
Plenty of companies have attached AI to their name for the label.
At Flowt, AI does the work that makes the loan possible. The software reads rather than predicts, pulling a business’s own transaction data from its accounting system and bank records, checking one against the other, and producing a picture accurate enough to lend against in an afternoon rather than six months. Climate capital in Africa has pooled in large energy deals because the smaller ones cost too much to assess. Cheap, accurate reading lowers the floor.
GreenBay has received the loan, used it to buy and sell more inventory and started making repayments through their Flowt wallet. The Flowt wallet infrastructure has introduced a discipline within GreenBay where a separate account is held for purchasing and collections, separating this cash from operating expenses. This structure gives lenders a better picture of the business and reduces risk for Flowt.