Kenyan agritech venture studio Pyramidia Ventures has secured $1.5m in funding from Dutch impact investor Triple Jump to expand its model of building and scaling climate-focused startups.
The investment, announced in May 2025, consists of a $1.3m funding commitment and $200,000 for technical assistance and business development support, provided via the Dutch Good Growth Fund (DGGF) which Triple Jump manages.
Pyramidia operates as a venture builder, a model that differs from traditional incubators or accelerators. Instead of investing in existing startups, the studio ideates, develops, and pilots its own business concepts in-house before recruiting co-founders to lead and scale them as independent companies.
The studio was founded in 2021 by Ruth Bertens, a former McKinsey consultant, and Joseph Rehmann, the founder of aquaculture company Victory Farms. Their goal is to create a pipeline of investable companies designed to make Africa’s agri-food systems more resilient and lower-carbon.
“A startup’s success is 30% ideation and 70% execution,” Bertens explained in a 2023 interview. She noted that solo founders often spend 50–80% of their time on fundraising and corporate administration. Pyramidia aims to remove this burden. “We try to take the corporate admin services away for them so that they can just focus on proving the business model and scaling it,” she said.
The studio’s process involves generating ideas, often by adapting globally proven technologies to the African context, and moving them through pilot, build, and scale phases.
This model has produced several ventures, most notably Stable Foods, a platform offering “irrigation-as-a-service” to smallholder farmers on a subscription basis. By creating economies of scale, Stable Foods makes irrigation accessible and affordable for small plots of land. The startup recently validated Pyramidia’s approach by securing its own $600k seed round from the Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund and Mercy Corps Ventures.
Other companies in Pyramidia’s portfolio include Womega, a venture focused on streamlining the fish supply chain, and Afriprotein, which produces alternative proteins for animal and human consumption.
The venture studio model, while gaining traction, presents unique challenges. Bertens has previously highlighted the difficulty of educating investors who are more accustomed to backing traditional founder-led teams. “Usually funds are used to investing in founders and the founders have 100% of the shares. It’s important for investors to see the venture studio as just another founder; that’s what it is, just a founder on steroids,” she said.
For investors like Triple Jump, Pyramidia’s model offers a systematic way to de-risk early-stage ventures and create a portfolio of high-impact companies addressing critical issues like food security and climate change. The new funding is expected to help Pyramidia launch new ventures, with the studio aiming to establish at least two new companies per year.