In the volatile world of African tech investment, where global venture capital sentiment can swing from euphoria to retreat in a single quarter, one investor has maintained a stubbornly consistent line of sight. All On, a Nigerian impact investment firm seeded by the oil major Shell, has quietly assembled one of the country’s most active clean energy portfolios, methodically closing transactions even as other corporate venturing arms have retreated, paused, or exited the market entirely.
While the broader venture ecosystem in Nigeria recalibrates from a fintech-dominated boom to a more sober reality, All On continues to write cheques. Its latest — a $1 million investment in Eja-Ice Nigeria Limited, a manufacturer of solar-powered refrigeration systems — is neither a one-off nor a departure. It is the continuation of a multi-year thesis that has made the firm an unavoidable participant in the off-grid energy sector, even as its presence raises questions about the role of fossil-fuel-linked capital in Africa’s green transition.
An Independent Operator with a Corporate Anchor
All On was established in 2016 with a seed funding commitment from Shell, but it operates as an independent entity with its own board, investment committee, and management. Caroline Eboumbou, who took over as chief executive in 2022, runs a team that has deployed over $40M of both debt and equity into early- to growth-stage companies in Nigeria’s energy access space. The firm’s mandate is tightly circumscribed: close the electricity gap for the country’s millions of off-grid and weak-grid households and enterprises by backing commercially viable renewable energy businesses.
This structure — a corporate-seeded impact vehicle with full investment independence — is relatively unusual in African markets. Most corporate venture initiatives in the region are captive, serving the strategic interests of a parent company’s core business. All On’s relationship with Shell is governed by a multi-year funding agreement, but Shell does not direct investment decisions, according to multiple people familiar with the arrangement. The firm raises no third-party capital and is not a fund in the traditional sense; it is a dedicated investment company deploying its endowment.
That independence has allowed All On to chart a course that sometimes diverges from the cyclical enthusiasms of the broader market. When fintech was the singular obsession of global limited partners, All On stayed in energy. When Covid-19 froze early-stage dealmaking across the continent, the firm continued to execute transactions — including a N2 billion ($1.2 million) seed round into Salpha Energy, a solar products distributor, and a $250,000 follow-on into ICE Solar.
The Pattern of Persistence
A review of All On’s publicly disclosed transactions reveals a consistent, almost formulaic approach. The firm does not chase deal volume for volume’s sake. Instead, it has constructed a portfolio along a clearly defined value chain, anchored around what practitioners call the “productive use of energy,” or PUE — the application of renewable power to drive economic activity rather than simple household consumption.
The Eja-Ice deal is instructive. The Lagos-based company designs and assembles solar-powered freezers, cold rooms, and cooling mobility solutions including refrigerated vans and tricycles. Its customer base includes smallholder farmers, fishing communities, and micro-enterprises that lose significant post-harvest value because they lack reliable grid power or rely on expensive, emissions-heavy diesel generators. Eja-Ice’s systems run entirely off-grid with no diesel backup, a direct substitution play that aligns with All On’s insistence on displacing fossil-fuel generation.
This investment does not sit in isolation. It follows a pattern set by earlier transactions. All On participated in the $11 million mixed debt and equity round for Koolboks, another solar-powered cooling company targeting off-grid markets. It backed Arnergy, a distributed solar provider for commercial and industrial clients, in a $15 million Series B extension that drew in development finance heavyweights British International Investment and Norfund alongside Breakthrough Energy Ventures. It invested in Rivy, a clean energy financing platform that provides the payment infrastructure critical to making solar assets affordable for small businesses. And it put early money into enee.io, a monitoring and management software firm that improves the operational economics of distributed energy systems.
Taken together, the portfolio forms a mosaic of the off-grid energy ecosystem: hardware manufacturing, distribution, financing, and asset optimisation. The ticket sizes vary dramatically — from $250,000 seed cheques to multi-million-dollar growth equity — suggesting a deliberate flexibility of instrument and stage.
“All On’s investment in Eja-Ice reflects our approach of supporting solutions that improve energy access while enhancing livelihoods, reducing costs, and enabling businesses to grow,” Eboumbou said in the firm’s statement on the deal. The language is characteristic: unflashy, impact-oriented, and tightly coupled to measurable outcomes. Eja-Ice projects that by 2028 it will support more than 1,500 micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), preserve between 4,000 and 7,000 tonnes of food annually, and avoid 30,000 to 50,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions.
The Fossil Fuel Question
For all its green portfolio credentials, All On’s parentage is impossible to ignore. Shell remains one of the world’s largest hydrocarbon producers, and its operations in Nigeria have been the subject of decades of environmental and human rights litigation. The Niger Delta, where much of Shell’s onshore production has been concentrated, remains one of the most energy-poor regions of the country despite sitting atop its oil wealth. That irony is not lost on All On’s founders or its critics.
The firm’s defenders — and there are many in the impact investing community — argue that the governance firewall between Shell and All On is substantive, not cosmetic. Investment decisions are made by All On’s team in Lagos, not Shell’s corporate venturing unit in London or The Hague. The capital, while originally sourced from the oil major, is irrevocably committed and not subject to clawback. And the portfolio’s impact metrics, they argue, should be judged on their own terms.
Detractors often counter that the arrangement functions as a sophisticated reputational hedge, allowing Shell to claim a stake in the energy transition while its core business continues to explore, produce, and trade hydrocarbons. In this reading, All On is not so much an impact investor as a strategic asset in a broader corporate narrative about a “just transition” that has yet to arrive for most of Nigeria’s population.
This tension is not unique to All On. It mirrors a global debate about the role of fossil fuel capital in financing the green transition. Are such vehicles genuine attempts to channel capital towards sustainable development, or are they elaborate exercises in brand management? The answer in All On’s case likely lies somewhere in between, and its ultimate test will be the durability of its independence should Shell’s strategic priorities — or financial circumstances — shift.
A Portfolio Built on Founders and Hardware
Another distinguishing feature of All On’s investment pattern is its willingness to back physical infrastructure and hardware-heavy businesses. At a time when venture capital globally has favoured capital-light software models, All On has consistently placed bets on companies that manufacture, distribute, and maintain tangible assets. Eja-Ice assembles solar freezers. Koolboks manufactures off-grid refrigeration units. Arnergy installs solar arrays on commercial rooftops. These are not app-based solutions to complex infrastructure deficits; they require supply chains, after-sales service networks, and patient capital to scale.
The firm also demonstrates a marked preference for local, technically grounded founders whose expertise is built in and for the domestic market. Eja-Ice was founded by Yusuf Bilesanmi, a law graduate by training whose earlier venture, Shifa Technologies, was recognised as a top finalist in the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering Africa Prize. Bilesanmi has spoken publicly about designing products “optimised right here on the continent,” articulating a philosophy of localised innovation that runs through much of the portfolio. Salpha Energy’s Sandra Chukwudozie cut her teeth inside the Dozzy Group, the industrial conglomerate founded by her father, the Nigerian business magnate Sir Daniel Chukwudozie, giving her direct exposure to the operational realities of scaling in Nigeria’s challenging business environment. Arnergy’s founding team includes former Huawei engineers with deep technical experience in telecommunications infrastructure. This pattern suggests an investment approach that values domain expertise and hands-on local execution capability, rather than placing a premium on foreign academic credentials or Silicon Valley résumés.
Founder selection is not the only signal. All On’s portfolio companies show a geographic concentration that is unusual for a sector often hyped for its pan-African ambitions. Every disclosed portfolio company is headquartered in Nigeria. Even when those companies articulate expansion plans into East or Southern Africa — as Eja-Ice has — the firm’s capital is deployed at the point of local origination, not regional scaling. This may be a function of mandate rather than philosophy, but it reinforces the sense of an investor that is both deeply embedded and deliberately bounded.
The Competitive Landscape
All On does not operate in a vacuum. Nigeria’s off-grid energy sector has attracted a range of development finance institutions, impact funds, and some commercial venture capital. The DFI cohort — including BII, Norfund, and the European development finance institutions — often appears alongside All On in later-stage syndicates. The presence of these co-investors, who typically have rigorous due diligence standards, provides an indirect validation of All On’s deal selection and portfolio management practices.
However, the firm’s ability to operate as what is effectively a corporate-backed, multi-stage, instrument-agnostic impact vehicle is a niche few others occupy. Traditional venture capital funds in Nigeria, such as EchoVC (which has co-invested with All On in Rivy), are constrained by fund mandates, return profiles, and limited partner expectations. DFIs have longer time horizons but often slower processes and political constraints. All On, unencumbered by the need to return capital to limited partners on a standard fund cycle, can afford to be more flexible — and more patient — than either.
That structural advantage is not permanent. The initial Shell endowment is finite, and the firm’s long-term capital sustainability may depend on recycling exits back into new investments — a mechanism that remains untested, as the portfolio has yet to produce a significant realisation event. How All On navigates this transition from pure deployment to capital recycling will determine whether it remains a permanent fixture in Nigerian energy finance or eventually fades.
The Stubborn Staying Power
What sets All On apart from many corporate venturing efforts is not merely the volume of its dealmaking but its refusal to exit the stage. Corporate venture capital is notoriously fickle, subject to the strategic whims and budget cycles of parent companies. Africa’s technology ecosystem is littered with examples of corporate initiatives that launched with fanfare and folded quietly when the anticipated synergies failed to materialise or a new chief financial officer arrived with different priorities.
All On, now in its seventh year of active deployment, has outlasted that typical cycle. It has done so while maintaining a consistent investment cadence, a disciplined thematic focus, and an apparent willingness to back companies through difficult periods when other risk capital might retreat. This persistence alone makes it a notable case study in African impact finance, irrespective of one’s view of its corporate parentage.
Whether the firm is a model to be replicated or an anomaly born of specific circumstances is a question that the market is still answering. What is clear is that for Nigerian energy entrepreneurs building physical solutions to some of the country’s most intractable infrastructure problems, All On has become a source of capital that — for now at least — simply will not go away.